


Pioneer to the Falls

by eonism



Series: Pioneer to the Falls [1]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Anal Sex, Blood, Bottom Will, Breathplay, Cannibalism, Domestic, Family, M/M, Murder Husbands, Original Lecter-Graham Child(ren), Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, Post-Series, Prostate Milking, Romance, Rough Sex, Sexual Content, Top Hannibal, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-29
Updated: 2016-01-04
Packaged: 2018-05-04 00:57:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 29,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5314013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eonism/pseuds/eonism
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will Graham dreamt he died at sea, and awoke to the warmth of the sun on his face. A bone-deep ache snapped up from the dark to tell him he was still alive. The irregular measure of another body’s labored breathing told him he wasn’t alone.</p><p>This is the story of what came after the wrath,  the fall, and everything that followed in its wake.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Will Graham dreamt he died at sea, and awoke to the warmth of the sun on his face. A bone-deep ache snapped up from the dark to tell him he was still alive. The irregular measure of another body’s labored breathing told him he wasn’t alone.

“Will.”

He heard the ocean crash against the shore somewhere outside of himself as he shrank back from darkness, aware of how finite he felt in his skin. He remembered the blood first, and how perfectly black it looked in the moonlight. It seemed right that the blood stayed with him, above all else. He remembered the way Dolarhyde’s belly opened up under his knife. He remembered the subterranean clockwork of Hannibal’s heartbeat whenever Will put his head to his chest.

He remembered the fall, the rush of the water, and the sudden, deafening nothing of everything after.

 _“Will.”_ Rough fingertips pushed the wet hair back from his face. “Stay with me, Will.”

Then, he knew.

They had to run.

\--

The body was a machine capable of astonishing cruelty. Will knew this as surely as he knew how to breathe.

There was once a time when Will thought of the body as a construction of breath and light. It was an inelegant and inefficient system, defined by soft edges, which needed laws to protect it from harm. Bodies could easily be destroyed by other bodies. Their hands and mouths could be weaponized, teeth sharpened by predatory natures. He used to think of Hannibal Lecter like this, and count him among the creatures that only stirred under the cover of dark.

There was a moment, if Will thought far enough back through the years, that he saw Hannibal as a nothing but a man. Back then, when things were simpler, Will saw Hannibal as having been made of the same fragile stuff as himself. Since then he had come to realize they were both built from an identical element, something hot and black that shone in moonlight.

What they were had fangs too sharp to be trusted among things as killable as people. They could only be with each other. Will now knew this, too.

Before Will undressed Hannibal to tend to his wounds, he thought of them both only as instruments of violence. The Hannibal that haunted the lonely halls of his memory palace was an assemblage of fine angles and ritualized geometry. Every line and intersecting plane was finely honed in the service of quickly, quietly, and effectively murdering bodies. This Hannibal, stripped down and laid out across the bed, was an altogether different creature from the one Will knew him to be.

Hannibal was wounded, pierced through the belly by Dolarhyde’s bullet. His ribs were battered, his shoulders bruised, torso a mess of purpled marks. Under the light of the bedside lamp, Will could see the enduring scars on Hannibal’s arms, face, chest, and back. Each recounted a specific act of violence; Will recognized his own work among them, in small nicks and corded scar tissue. But, easing Hannibal over the clean the entrance wound in his back, the brand Will found there unsettled him in ways he didn’t like.

The circular burn in the center of Hannibal’s spine had healed into a set of swollen, but legible, letters. Will remembered seeing it seared into the sides of Mason Verger’s pigs. The realization was at first cold before it settled hotly in the pit of Will’s stomach. Then he remembered that Mason was three years dead already, and there was nothing to be done about it. That, too, unsettled him. Without any sensible recourse, he applied antiseptic to the bullet wound and began to sew it shut.

“When did that happen?”

It was difficult to talk with the hole Dolarhyde had cut out of his cheek, but Will risked it just the same. He was seated behind Hannibal on the bed of the farmhouse Hannibal had directed him to, as he laid dazed and half-coherent in the back seat of the car. Once the rush of killing Dolarhyde had worn off, neither of them were much good for anything but bleeding.

“The brand, I mean,” Will said when he received no answer. “That’s a bit exotic, even for the kinds of scars we’ve been carrying around.”

Will had stolen the car that drove them to safety. He vaguely remembered the act, helping Hannibal from the shore and toward the nearby road. There they happened upon a motorist. The man stopped and pulled over when he saw the blood on them, and there had been so much of it. He was an unassuming older man in bifocals and a heavy, green hound’s tooth sweater. Will knew he had harmed him – scratching his fists on the man’s glasses and teeth – but he was sure hadn’t killed him. He would have remembered that.

The man wasn’t killable, even by Will’s flexible standards of necessary cruelty. They took the car and left the man, wounded but alive.

“At the Verger farm. When we were last there together.” Hannibal’s voice was thin when he spoke, his breath wrung out by the stab of the needle. “Mason found it a fitting insult to mark me before he ate me.”

The account was so placid that it gave Will pause. Despite the sum of visible brutality Hannibal wore on his skin, the brand was the only scar that made him look in any way fragile. Of all the times Will thought of Hannibal as killable – and even when he was bleeding at Dolarhyde’s feet the night before – the idea that Hannibal could be so suddenly vulnerable made Will feel…

 _Feral_.

He said nothing of it. It was all so tangled in blood and sweat that he swallowed it away; set it aside for another, clearer moment. Then he pulled the suture taut, tied it off, and clipped the excess with scissors. He focused on what was in front of him.

“I didn’t know,” Will said, and hated how shaky it sounded. His face ached and he could still taste his own blood in the wound.

“Nor was there reason for you to. I believe you were about to have your face removed.”

“Still, hindsight is twenty-twenty. I should’ve taken more than just Cordell’s cheek when I had the chance.”

Hannibal’s laugh was small and pained. With some effort, he managed to turn over. “Are you my protector, Will?”

Will considered the word, and the form of the things that it implied. “I never thought of you as a person who needed to be protected. Or of myself as the one to do it.”

The humor fell away from the corner of Hannibal’s mouth. “And now? Do you think of me any differently now that you’ve washed the blood off your hands?”

After a moment, Will finally nodded. “I feel...obligated.”

“This isn’t about obligations.”

“Obliged, then.”

The admission softened Hannibal’s expression into something far more loving than Will knew he deserved. Hannibal lifted a long and fine-fingered hand to trace Will’s cheek and jaw. Will held a breath and let him, just as he let himself lean into the touch.

“Come. Give me the sutures,” said Hannibal. “Let me fix your cheek before you make that hole any bigger.”

Will sat obediently while Hannibal cared for him, and closed his eyes.

\--

The farmhouse was secluded enough behind miles and miles of Virginian backroads that they could rest, if only for the moment.

Will retrieved two changes of clothes from the wardrobe and left Hannibal in bed to sleep off the worst of the pain. Hannibal’s clothes were an odd fit on Will. The pants were too long for his smaller stature and the shirt’s fit was too tailored, but he ignored it by cuffing the hems and unbuttoning the shirt collar. He started two fires: one to keep out the chill, and another outside to burn their ruined clothes while he still had daylight.

Before Hannibal fell asleep, he had explained that the farmhouse was one of a few properties he had owned, before. There was only before and after now. The spaces were kept under various names and for various purposes, depending on whether he needed to keep a body or dismember it. This place was one of two the FBI hadn’t traced back to him and seized. It didn’t occur to Will to be disturbed by the disclosure. He was more concerned with finding a screwdriver in the shed to remove the license plates from the car. Eventually he would need hydrogen peroxide to bleach their blood from the upholstery, but the holes in his face and shoulder made it difficult to think that far ahead yet.

In another life, Will would have been similarly disturbed at how easy it was to destroy evidence. He didn’t have the luxury in this life anymore. Dolarhyde was dead at the cliffs, giftwrapped for Jack Crawford with Will’s blood and Hannibal’s teeth marks, after they had all three just fled the scene of a grisly prison break. If he had any sense, he would have laughed at how absurd it all was. How certainly they could be caught, how simple they had made it with the trail of evidence leading right to the farmhouse.

But he didn’t have the luxury to dwell on that, either. By sundown, the exhaustion Will had ignored all day dragged him away from his preparations. He put another log on the fire, limped to the bedroom, and undressed.

\--

They slept in the same bed for the three days they spent at the farmhouse, maneuvering under the stiff sheets to lie down beside each other. Their wounds made it difficult to occupy the same space, aware of stitches and bandages, bumping elbows and brushing knees. The implications of words like sleep and together reached into Will’s core and hollowed him out as surely as the look in Hannibal’s eyes did whenever they got this close.

These were just distant thoughts before the fall, as soaked as they were in Bedelia’s syrupy voice when she spoke of love and ache. _Love_ and _ache_. And how he hated her, in some mute and inarticulate way, for knowing what to call it.

On the first night, they collapsed into sleep. On the second, Hannibal was the one who reached across the sliver of space between them and put his hand on Will’s arm. The weight of it was gentle and exploratory. When Will didn’t refuse it, the hand traveled to Will’s bicep, up his neck, and to his face.

“You know what I’m going to ask you.” Hannibal’s words were soft and without impetus. “I’m well-aware that this is neither the time nor place for it. Even if it were, this isn’t what I would have wanted for you.”

“But you’re going to ask me, anyway.”

“Yes.”

Will’s heart hammered in his chest. He knew Hannibal could feel it. “You’re going to ask if I want you the way that you want me.”

“What we share is already profoundly different from anything we’re capable of having with anyone else. That is beyond question.” Hannibal’s hand wandered again, this time into Will’s hair to fondly stroke his scalp. “Don’t misunderstand me, Will – I have no uncertainties about what I want from you. But I can no more force you to return my affections than I could force you to act against your essential nature. I’m not that cruel.”

Will swallowed. “But you do want this.”

“I do. And I have.”

The shadows stretching across the room made Hannibal look younger, smoothing his scars and hard edges with darkness. He looked vulnerable, Will thought.

“For how long?”

“For as long as I’ve known you, perhaps, but I don’t know the precise moment. These things tend to blur between us.” Hannibal’s mouth curved into something of a smile. “It seems you’ve made me your fool as much as I’ve made you mine.”

“But even after everything that’s happened?” Will asked. He had to ask, had to know. “I rejected you. I left you in a cage—”

“A cage I chose for myself.”

“Because I turned you away.”

“And now I have you,” Hannibal said. “Do I not?”

“It’s not…the wanting that I lack.” Will took a deep breath. He tried to assemble his loud and rambling thoughts into the shape of something useful. Something he could grab onto and keep for himself. “It’s knowing how to want properly that I can’t get a handle on.”

“So you’re afraid, then?”

Will didn’t respond.

A pause. Hannibal removed his hand from Will’s hair. Will found he missed the touch to an alarming degree, but said nothing. Hannibal then looked at Will as he would something fit to be killed. Will said nothing of that, either.

“If I held you down and took what I wanted from you, would you try to stop me? Or would you let me, because you knew you had no alternative?”

Will recoiled. His voice was like a dagger when he spoke.

“You _wouldn’t_ do that.”

“Of course I wouldn’t. Just the thought of forcing myself on you is abhorrent to me,” Hannibal said. “That’s why I can’t stand you thinking of my affections as something to fear.”

Hannibal’s hand returned to its idle musings in Will’s hair. The touch settled him.

“I don’t fear you,” Will said. “And I don’t fear this.”

“Then what do you fear?”

“I’m afraid of how it would change things.”

“For you?”

“For _us_.”

“Every element in our bodies is undergoing continual and imperceptible change,” said Hannibal. “We are all subject to the laws of entropy. The gradual decline from what we perceive as order to we fear to be chaos is natural, distressing though it may be. You and I are no different.”

“Because we embraced entropy and resigned ourselves to chaos?” Will almost laughed at the thought.

“No. Because you finally accepted change.”

Cupping Will’s face between his hands, Hannibal kissed him. Slowly, chastely, how other people in love would kiss one another. Will was the one who opened his mouth to deepen it, who leaned forward when Hannibal leaned back. Will was the one who gave chase, but was stopped by the touch on his shoulder.

“And I will wait,” Hannibal said, “until you can accept this, as well.”

After a moment, Will nodded.

\--

Will rarely slept during the first days after they awoke on the shore. When he did sleep, he dreamt of drowning in the dark and of blood in the water, spreading out across the wave like great red wings. He spent so long dreaming of things other than violence, hidden away at the cabin with Molly and Walter, that now his nightmares approached him as something of a comfort. They were warm and familiar as they crept out of the shadows edging the corner of the room. They climbed into the bed to take his face into their hands, to kiss the places behind his eyes, and to whisper about what he feared most of all.

Sometimes Will woke, in the middle of the night or right before dawn, to Hannibal’s hands cupping his face. His hands were dry and rough at the tips. They inspected the stitches in Will’s cheek before moving to those in his shoulder, applying antiseptic and changing bandages. This was a comfort, too, and the ritual of it lulled him back to sleep each time.

On the third morning, Will woke tumbling out of a nightmare. He dreamt of flesh and bones, battered by rocks on the jagged Atlantic coastline, and of plunging into wet blackness. It had engulfed him, filling his nose and mouth and eyes to suck him all the way down to the ocean floor. There was no life, no sound or light, and it brought him surging out of bed to gasp for air. As Will struggled, Hannibal caught him, steadied him, and eased him back into bed.

“There, I have you,” he felt rather than heard Hannibal murmur against his neck. “Just rest now.”

The blind, naked panic eased out of Will’s muscles as he came to his senses. He rubbed at his eyes and shook his head to clear the fog.

“Sorry. S’just a nightmare.”

“No need to apologize,” said Hannibal. “Although it looks like you’ve irritated your stitches in your rush to get out of bed.”

Will didn’t feel the tear, but when he touched the bandage on his cheek his fingers came back spotted red. Hannibal retrieved the makeshift medical kit from the bedside table and took Will by the chin to tip his head back. He began his ritual anew, starting at the tear in Will’s cheek. Will watched him in the pale gray light coming from the window across the room, where all their scars and seams showed.

Captivity had changed Hannibal, and in the silence Will was able to see how. It aged him in fine lines around his eyes and knuckles, and gathered in his spine to alter his careful posture by small degrees. His fingers were still nimble but not as well-maintained as Will remembered them being. The nails were rough and uneven now, the cuticles snagged at their corners. Hannibal was far too vain to acknowledge even the slightest compromise to his appearance, so Will said nothing as Hannibal unbuttoned his shirt and slipped it off to inspect his shoulder.

“You don’t have to,” Will felt compelled to say. “I’ll be fine.”

“And there you are, still apologizing. I’m beginning to think that you don’t listen to me.”

“Not an apology. Just an objective observation.”

“Forgive me if I don’t trust your objectivity. You want to protect me by denying that you need to be cared for, because you believe it’ll lessen your burden on me.” Hannibal took Will’s hands next, looking over his knuckles. They still carried the marks of the motorist’s teeth. “But you fail to realize that caring for you is my way of protecting you from the world.”

“You’ve been shot, Hannibal,” Will reminded him.

“Yes. And you have a hole in your face.”

“You have a hole in your middle.”

“But I’m much more invested in your face.”

Before Will could launch into his next protest, Hannibal shifted to lie back against the headboard. He guided Will to rest beside him, Will’s head in his lap. Will closed his eyes and let himself be drawn toward sleep by the light patterns Hannibal traced behind his ear.

“I see you haven’t taken off your wedding ring.”

Will opened his eyes as Hannibal took his hand, palm-up, to examine his ring finger. The speed with which Will had removed himself from Molly’s life caught up to him in a sudden, grinding halt. He had been married to and raised a child with a woman, then neglected to think of them at all.

The realization was…uncomfortable.

“I guess I haven’t finished shedding my skin yet.”He took off the ring and placed it on the nightstand. Then he got up to retrieve his clothes, and to avoid the conversation entirely. “We should get back on the road today. My shoulder’s still shot but I can drive. At least across the state line, anyway.”

Will could feel Hannibal’s eyes on his back. The heat of his gaze was all too habitual, the way the air felt warmer for it. Jealousy was such an ugly thing to brandish, but it never stopped either them from doing so before.

“Have you contacted them?” asked Hannibal.

“What, with Jack wiretapping the house? Waiting for me to slip up?” Will was almost insulted. “That would lead them right to us. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t.”

“Do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Want to contact them?”

Will put on his shirt, buttoned it, and tucked it into his slacks. “I don’t know. I should want to. I owe them at least an afterthought.”

“You’re dead to them in their world, Will,” Hannibal said. Softly, as though probing at an old wound. But they both knew the betrayal of sending Dolarhyde after Molly and Walter was still fresh, plunged like a spear into Will’s side. “It isn’t fair to try to haunt them, even if it is an act of contrition.”

Will shook his head. “I didn’t think to take the ring off. I didn’t even think to acknowledge it. I left my family at the door when I walked into your cell. They just…melted away, like they were never really mine.”

“Good. Let them mourn you, then forget you.”

A pause. Will changed the subject.

“We need to get back on the road today.”

Hannibal let it die there. Will was grateful for it, although he would never say so.

\--

“This feels like the very definition of an awful idea.”

Will watched the rural landscape speed by in the dark. He rested his forehead on the passenger side window. Sleep had eluded him for the last day and it showed in his fraying nerves, darkening the skin around his eyes like a bruise.

“They’ll be expecting something like this. Waiting for us to appear in familiar places, contact former acquaintances, fall into old patterns…like creatures of habit.”

Hannibal didn’t look from the road when he spoke. “You forget that I was only captured because I allowed myself to be taken. I have no such interest in being caught again.”

The assurance did little to quell the dull roar of Will’s grim and insular thoughts. “You’re driving us to your house. The scene of a very extensive assortment of crimes.”

“Yes. Of which we’re both guilty.”

“Which is why this is an awful idea.”

“The passports I planned to use for our initial escape are still there. It’s faster to retrieve them than to have new papers forged. Trust me. This is the most direct route to our freedom.”

“How do you know they’re still there?”

“The police never found them. That was why you were never implicated in my plan to leave the country,” Hannibal said. “I hid them behind a false wall tile in the kitchen – right by the cook books.”

Hannibal offered Will a smile. Will shook his head and looked back to the edges of the road. The chewed concrete bled into the darkness beyond the glow of the car’s headlights.

“There won’t be a hole dark or deep enough to throw us into with any measure of satisfaction. Although I can think of a few people wouldn’t mind the digging.”

“I told you. You worry too much.”

“We’ll be separated. It’s the most fitting punishment. Kept in separate cages – maybe even separate trials, just to be vindictive. They know to use that against us.”

It was easier to say _they_. _They_ were all-knowing and pervasive. _They_ were easy to dehumanize and make killable, if it came to that. Hannibal remained unfazed by the need for any such distinction.

“We won’t be separated, and we won’t be caught. I won’t allow it.”

Will looked at Hannibal’s profile, considering the implications of his statement. Eventually he swallowed and said, “If we are caught—“

“ _Will_.”

The warning in Hannibal’s voice was without teeth, so Will chose to ignore it.

“ _If_ we’re caught, what are we going to do?”

Hannibal took a deep breath, the way he did whenever he found himself in deliberation. “We can’t survive separation any more than we can survive execution. If we are caught, and we have no chance of escape, we’ll have to resign ourselves to die by our own hands.”

“Freedom or death?” Will asked.

“Death would be freedom if it was on our terms. To preserve our dignities.”

“How?” Practicality made Will’s voice cold.

Another pause. “In a perfect world, I would give you an overdose of sedatives and let you die in your sleep. Since we live in an imperfect world, I imagine I’ll have to cut your throat. It’s efficient, if not ideal.”

Will nodded. There was a sense of safety in the knowledge it would be Hannibal’s hand on the blade. “I suppose I would do the same. God knows I’ve thought about it enough in the past. It would be easy…but not ideal.”

“The instinctive need to protect one’s family will drive one to do the unthinkable. Or in our case, the undesirable,” Hannibal said. “I have no desire to hurt you again, Will, but I will kill you if it saves you from them.”

“The things we do for family.” Will pressed his lips together to wet them. He chose his next words carefully. They still felt a stranger to his tongue, made of stuff that got caught in his throat whenever he pictured himself saying them aloud. “And for love.”

When Hannibal finally met Will’s gaze, the air between them felt different. It felt warmer now, pregnant with a hungry swarm of possibilities that were at once thrilling and terrifying to Will. But Hannibal simply nodded.

“Yes. For love.”

\--

On the sixth night they laid down to sleep beside each other, it was Will who reached for Hannibal. Sometime after sundown, his wilting reluctance gave way to a boldness that left him feeling unhinged, sharper and hungrier than he had allowed himself to be in years. What spilled out of him now was far more symmetrical than he ever gave himself credit for. It collided with the complementary angles of Hannibal’s body, pushing their mouths together in a full and open kiss. It felt right, like a blade in his hand or blood on his lips.

Hannibal’s hands framed Will’s face as he deepened the kiss with his tongue and teeth. He bit Will’s lip gently, then his chin. The tenderness of the act both excited and saddened Will when he placed it within the context of the years they’d spent apart. It left him feeling feral, like the brand on Hannibal’s back made him feral, straining against the tautness of the chain he put himself on. Hannibal kissed him like a man at prayer, even though he would have hated the image if Will spoke the words aloud. Forgiveness sighed in every shared breath, but Will didn’t want forgiveness. He didn’t need it, either. It felt like pity now, if he thought about it. They were both so wounded by Will’s hesitance, his doublethink, and his fury, marking each of them for life. Will saw now what he had been so long fighting against as he pressed Hannibal into the mattress to pin him in place.

The hole in Hannibal’s belly kept him from pursuing Will as he wanted to be pursued, so Hannibal allowed him this. Allowed Will to devour his mouth, his throat, and his chest in bruising kisses, teething at the thin skin to leave his own mark behind. For all the years Will spent convinced that this would only ever end with them alienated from everything but one another, it had never occurred to him that there might be pleasure in such completeness.

Will undressed himself before undressing Hannibal with equal haste. He remained mindful of stitches and scars as he took Hannibal’s erection with a spit-shiny palm, wanting to touch and lick and know every inch of the other man’s body. Every angle, every juncture; the intimate peaks and valleys of skin, bone, and muscle. The look that fell over Hannibal’s face was at once relieved and joyous. Will recognized that same look from the cliffs, whenever their eyes met from across the darkness hovering over Dolarhyde’s ruined body. He recognized the way Hannibal loved him, and how it bled out of him again to spill over onto Will now.

Their first coupling was as brutal as it needed to be as Will bore down on Hannibal, slick with saliva and pre-come, to bring their bodies together. He wasn’t prepared for the way it felt to be filled so completely by another person, or how his body stretched to accept the penetration. The old, visceral urge to escape shook him but Hannibal’s hands gripped his hips. They steadied him in the first slow, exploratory thrusts, grounding him in the moment. His panic broke like a fever as pleasure brought him back to his senses, and Hannibal let Will take it for himself.

And once he decided to take he did so recklessly, arched forward, and starved for touch and taste. He gripped Hannibal’s shoulder and bit his way inside his mouth, riding him as ferociously as his still-healing body would allow. Wrenching, howling, all snapping teeth and claws. Their love made him a vicious and hungry thing, but it was in every measure as much about punishment as it was desire. He needed to exorcise this wrath he still held, to have it beaten or bled or fucked out of him. That was the only way he was ever going to live with this. With what they were now, together, as his knees burned and his thighs felt like they were going to rubber.

Because he did want to live with this. Live _like_ this. He wanted it so much, as he pressed his forehead to Hannibal’s shoulder to hide his face, their bodies so warm they felt identical to the touch. Exhaustion gripped him then, stalling him as the muscles in his back and hips melted under his skin. Every fiber of him sang.

“Don’t retreat, Will. Not this time.” Hannibal held Will’s face, pushing back his sweat-damp hair to look him in the eye.“I need you to stay with me.”

Will nodded dumbly. His mouth felt like it was stuffed with cotton, his throat too hoarse to speak. He went willingly as Hannibal turned him over to lie against the cool sheets. The sudden feeling of emptiness when they pulled away from one another caught Will off-guard, leaving him acutely aware of how his body felt without Hannibal inside it. He didn’t have to dwell on it long, as Hannibal held him to his chest and entered him again in measured, restrained thrusts. This had even less to do with sex as Hannibal kissed his face and stroked his hair, murmuring pointless and artful things into Will’s mouth.

This was about keeping Will. Adoring him. Owning him.

For it, Will felt safe.


	2. Chapter 2

Will didn’t write the letter.

When he awoke in tangled sheets and darkness, he found himself exorcised of his wrath but not his guilt. The pristine, full-color memory of Molly in the dull green sheets of her hospital bed had mutated as he slept. It became something else, something heavier and sharper.

Stirring to the warm press of Hannibal’s naked body against his, the thought of his wife lying broken and bloodied filled him with the sudden, restless obligation to confess. To contextualize, to justify and explain. He felt remorse for so little now that what was left gathered high in his throat. This guilt had claws, desperate for escape as heat and breath. He knew it would threaten to choke him if he didn’t cut it out first.

Cut it out, or write it down.

But he didn’t write the letter.

The words he had in mind were too slippery. They were formless and wet as he took the pen in hand, trying to summon them in some solid, meaningful way. He meant to give Molly the written history of his unique pathological deviation, a shape of what he was and how he became that way. He meant to tell her that what he felt for her was real; it was true and human and vital to who he was for three years. It wasn’t was a fraud or an act, or some fatal flaw in her that had driven him away.

Yet the letter in his mind always ended the same ugly way, no matter how coherently he tried to describe what he was becoming so she could understand and accept it.

_I love you. I’m sorry. ~~It’s not your fault.~~_

_~~I have to do this.~~ _

_~~I love him.~~ _

_~~I need him.~~ _

~~_This is all I’ve ever wanted._ ~~

Instead, Will quickly scratched _Please forget me_ , folded the note in half, and placed it in an envelope with his wedding ring. To write anything else would have been unbearably selfish, so he sealed his plea and dropped it in a mailbox, bound for the cabin. Molly may not have been there when it arrived, and he accepted that. She might not have ever gone back. She deserved better than a crime scene for a home and his belongings haunting every room.

In the end, all he could give her was scorched earth.

When Will returned to their room, Hannibal was in the shower. As Hannibal emerged, toweled dry and dressed, he found Will on the floor by the bathroom doorway. Will sat with his knees tucked under his arms, his back to the wall, and his knife in his hand.

“Are you alright?” Hannibal asked.

“Yes,” Will said. His hands busied themselves with the handle of his blade, comforted by the weight of it. “And no.”

“I’m certain I haven’t been awake long enough to offend you, so a hint might be useful if I’m to know why not.”

“I finished shedding my skin today.”

Hannibal studied Will for a long and quiet moment. “How did it make you feel?”

“Aren’t you going to ask me how?”

“I assumed you would do this at some point. You need closure – all things tied up neatly with a bow. Did you write a letter?”

“I sent the ring back,” Will answered, looking at his knife rather than Hannibal. It was easier that way. “And I asked Molly to forget me.”

“That’s the most humane thing you can do for them.” Hannibal seated himself on the floor beside Will. Will suspected the closeness served to better observe him. “And for yourself.”

“I know.”

“Yet you still feel guilty for leaving them.”

“I feel…bereaved. But the loss isn’t mine – it’s theirs. Like I’m at my own funeral, looking at myself in the casket.” Will shook his head. “I can’t help but hate myself for abandoning them like that.”

“You have to kill that part of yourself and let it die with them. Grieve them, then leave them behind where they belong.”

“It’s not that simple. You know it isn’t that simple.”

“Will – ”

“ _Don’t_.” Will’s fingers closed reflexively around the blade. He pressed his lips together, wet them, and collected himself. “I need you to listen to me very carefully, Hannibal. I’m only going to ask this of you once. Do you understand me?”

Hannibal looked down at the blade before his eyes returned to Will. “Yes.”

“You have me now. I will follow you anywhere you go, and I will never leave you. But my family, and every moment that you and I spent apart for the last three years, belongs to me. You will not speak of them. You will not feign righteous indignation and hold them over my head. I’ve forgiven you for everything you’ve ever done to me, but I’m asking you to let me have this.”

A pause. “A compromise, then? To maintain this peace so that we don’t go back to war with each other?”

“Not a compromise,” Will said. “Compassion.”

The look of hurt that fell over Hannibal’s face lodged between Will’s ribs like a knife.

“The idea that your family should be allowed to live and breathe in a world where ours was long dead felt like a violation. I simply wanted to violate you in kind. I didn’t know at the time that we would find ourselves here. That complicates things.”

“You thought I would disappear again, so you wanted to wound me while you still had the chance,” Will said. “Nothing complicated about it.”

Hannibal swallowed. His gaze returned to the blade in Will’s hand. He slowly, carefully, uncoiled Will’s fingers from it. With Will disarmed, he gathered himself and said, “My compassion for you will always far outweigh my wrath. But I’m still sorry.”

Disarmed, disassembled, tears crept unbidden into the corners of Will’s eyes. “So am I.”

Another pause. Hannibal asked, “Are you going to stay?”

Will nodded. “Where else would I go?”

“No.” Pain crept into Hannibal’s voice to erode its resolve. “You’ve said this to me before, Will, right before you stuck your knife in my back. Either you choose to stay, or you don’t. No half-measures or lies.”

“Hannibal.” Will placed his hand on the juncture of Hannibal’s neck and shoulder, thumbing along the steady tick of the other man’s pulse. He leaned in to kiss him—softly, sweetly, and without pretense. “This is all I’ve ever wanted.”

\--

The first time they coupled, it was raw, loveless fucking. Their intimacy was hard and mechanical, just biting kisses and fingers scrabbling for purchase against skin and cotton sheets. Will required as much as he sought to classify the animal hunger that clawed out of him that night, his body made feral by the closeness of Hannibal’s. He needed it that way, like fire and pain. It was the only way he knew how to kill the quiet, lingering dissonance between what he knew to be true of himself in the widening gulf between _before_ and _after_.

Before, as a man who had only ever loved women, and after, as a man who only ever felt complete in Hannibal’s presence. Before the ache, and after the fall. Then, it was different between them. It was safe.

Every time after, whenever Hannibal would take Will by the hand to lead him to bed, it felt more like love. They undressed one another carefully. Their hands were well-aware of stitches and scar tissue, fingers mindful not to press too hard or pull too roughly. The tenderness of it always caught Will off-guard, in those first quiet moments when Hannibal was kissing him, all breath and light. But he was trying to learn now, how to be better. How to be less hard and jagged around his edges, too thorny to touch without drawing blood.

His body was so used to violence wherever Hannibal was concerned. Whether suffering or enacting it, as the difference between the two diminished over time. Instead he found himself laid out across the sheets, on his back, but sometimes his stomach or his side. Hannibal kissed him, and held him, and fucked him the way he loved him: wholly and reverently. Sometimes they fucked one another, whenever Will wanted to see what Hannibal looked like laid completely bare beneath him, but Will was more than content with being owned.

Being owned meant he belonged somewhere, and to someone. Being owned meant it was safe, even when the world outside wasn’t. Afterwards, they slept, and Will didn’t dream of water or blood.

This night, Will didn’t sleep. There was a buzzing in his head that wouldn’t go away, like a hornet that had wandered in behind his eyes. Hannibal was already asleep, or trying; the measured clockwork of his breathing told Will as much. Will spoke nonetheless, even if the words stumbled in the space between his brain and tongue.

“I want to share something with you,” he said, already aware of how callow it sounded.

Hannibal didn’t stir. “You’ve reciprocated quite enough already. However, I appreciate the gesture.”

“Some _one_ , then?”

When Hannibal opened his eyes to study Will, his expression put Will on edge. Perhaps this was a bad idea, but it didn’t feel like one. It felt imperative.

“How did this come about?”

“I have some unfinished business with your psychiatrist when we get to Baltimore," Will said. "We both do.”

“Bedelia knows what she owes me, just as she knows I haven’t forgotten. I’ll come to collect when I’m ready.”

“She has more than that coming.”

A pause. “Whenever I imagined us having this conversation, I expected it to go quite differently. I also expected it be sometime down the road from where we are now.”

“You, asking me,” Will said. “Not the other way around.”

“Don’t misunderstand me – I’m grateful for your willingness. Nothing would please me more than to have you hunt with me.”

“…But.”

“What we shared with the Red Dragon was vitally necessary, but we are together undergoing great change,” said Hannibal. “You most of all.”

“I’m not one of your goddamn teacups, Hannibal,” Will said, “I won’t break.”

“No, but you have nothing to prove to me, either. This is something that should be enjoyed, not tolerated.”

“This isn’t a peace offering, and I’m not apologizing.”

“I never said you were.”

Will took a deep breath. He tried to catch his thoughts as they rolled away on their spools. Tried to be less angry about how easily Hannibal could read his cracks and seams.

“I’m not altogether unselfish in wanting this. I hate that she’s made a name by painting herself as your helpless victim. I hate even more that she thought she could have you and walk away unscathed. But I want to give this to you more than I want to have it for myself.”

Hannibal studied Will for another moment. “This is a gift, then. You wish to catch something valuable for me, like a cat would a sparrow to leave at its master’s feet.”

The allegory felt apt, in the face of things. Will nodded. Hannibal cupped Will’s cheek with his palm, tracing the line of Will’s mouth with his thumb.

“What a cruel boy you are.”

Relief came over Will. It crested with the suddenness of a wave and rolled back. He opened his lips to accept the gentle press of Hannibal’s thumb against them, drawing the digit in between his teeth. Hannibal looked pleased.

“I need you to tell me that this is what you want,” he said. “There can be no doubt for you.”

“I want to go to Baltimore,” Will answered, slowly and certainly. “And I want to visit your psychiatrist.”

“Would that make you happy?” asked Hannibal.

“Yes.”

“Then we’ll go together.”

\--

Walking through the rooms of Bedelia Du Maurier’s house felt like dreaming. The soft shudder of candlelight made the liminal assembly of walls and furniture appear alive, breathing in the corners wherever shadows met. It didn’t feel real to Will. He had been there no more than two weeks prior, seated in the armchair across from Bedelia, speaking of love and ache. But that was a lifetime ago, and being in human spaces reminded him of the profound change he had undergone in that time. Such rooms made him aware of how much sharper he felt inside his own clothes now, like attending the dress rehearsal for someone else’s life, or watching a play.

Will found Bedelia on a train. It was raining. She wore a red dress. She didn’t try to escape. A part of him wished she had, in some dark and spiteful place that resided behind his ribcage. They both knew it was no more her role to run than it was his to give chase. After all, this had been a long time coming.

Hannibal, however, was perfectly at home in this dramatization. He prepared dinner in Bedelia’s kitchen, his waistcoat undone, shirtsleeves neatly folded at the elbows. All grace, he moved from the oven to the stovetop to the cutting board and back again, his hands deft with the blade. As though moving to music. Will poured three glasses of wine: one to leave for Hannibal on the counter, two others to take to the dining room. Hannibal pressed a quick and grateful kiss to Will’s temple and returned to slicing vegetables. For a moment, they were like normal people.

It felt…comfortable.

In the next room, Bedelia waited silently in a sloping armchair. The whole of her bathed in the long and elegant drape of her gown, watching the fire crackle warmly in the hearth. Her left leg had been severed, cleaned, and dressed in bandages. Will handed her a glass and took the chair beside her.

“Dinner’s almost ready,” he said.

She studied the glass for a moment, then let it rest against the arm of the chair. He settled into his seat with a sip.

“Relax, Bedelia. The wine isn’t poisoned.”

“No, that would be messy and ineffective,” she said. “I understand you to be more…intimate in your violence, if what I’ve read on _TattleCrime_ is true.”

“That and you’d make a poor Gertrude.”

“If I were you, I would be curious to see if the blade he’s stuck you with hasn’t already been poisoned.” She smiled at that, a sharp and feline expression. “But I suppose Hannibal wouldn’t risk tainting the meat so carelessly.”

“We’ve taken everything we wanted from you already. Consider this a social call.”

“You mean you’ve come to play with your food first.”

Humor quirked the corners of his mouth. “Is that what you imagine is happening? You’re the poor trapped canary, and I’m the cat that’s come to savage you in your cage?”

“I have no delusions about what I am, Will. Just as you have no delusions about what you are.” She took a sip and ran her fingers along the stem of the glass. The fire popped and hissed to fill the space between them with heat. “Hannibal must be so proud his pet. You even hunt his trophies for him.”

“I’m not the one who rolled over and played dead.”

“Survival instincts manifest in different ways. I escape to higher ground; you cling for safety in the flood. Both strategies are equally valid.” Her face softened, if only by degrees. “I can see why he chose you. Your cruelty so lovingly complements his own.”

He shook his head. “He didn’t choose me any more than he rejected you. You and I are just carved from different stuff.”

She started to laugh, but the sound quaked with rage. “You simpering little boy. Do you honestly believe that you won’t end up in this chair when he grows bored with you? Or do you labor under the illusion that this is true love?”

“Some predators are solitary hunters. Others mate for life.”

“How long such a life lasts is dependent solely on how long Hannibal wishes it to, in case you haven’t realized. And you’re already so full of scars.”

“Hope is a thing with feathers,” he said. “Love is a thing with teeth.”

Regarding him silently, she took another sip. “Then I hope, for your sake, you never suffer the indignity of discovering how you taste.”

“Oh, Bedelia,” he drawled. “What makes you think I don’t already know?”

\--

They took the leg, but left Bedelia alive. She didn’t know why. She would never know why -- nor would she know if they were ever coming back -- alone, watching the fire slowly die away into silence.

_Damned if I'll feel_ , Will thought, and found himself satisfied in that knowledge.

\--

“Rudolph Strand.”

Will Graham was effectively dead. The FBI manhunt underway along the eastern seaboard saw to that. Jack Crawford was likely still out looking for bodies to dredge up from the sea or to haul home in chains, defanged and locked up in cages. Rudolph Strand, however, was very much alive – and free. He was thirty-nine years old and was born in Bruges to parents Erich and Mila. The fifteen years spent at his home address in Maine conveniently explained away the American accent, at least.

“And I’m a teacher. How thoughtful of you.”

“I thought it would give you the chance to return to the classroom, should the urge strike you.”

Across the room, Hannibal neatly folded and packed their things into a single suitcase on the foot of the bed. Retrieving their passports and documents was the primary goal in returning to Baltimore; visiting with Bedelia was a satisfying detour. Acquiring a few changes of clothes and other niceties, however, was necessary to keep up appearances for their flight to France. France, because Hannibal said he wanted an apartment in Paris. Perhaps a house in Boulogne, or even a little place Le Marais if he could be persuaded. Will said he just wanted to live in a country that didn’t extradite.

In either event, their freedom was close enough to taste.

Will paced the floor with his new life assembled in text and ID photos. He shuffled inquiringly through the documents and legal credentials that outlined the stories they would have to tell whenever asked. Internally, he practiced the way the new name sounded inside his skull, familiarizing himself with the consonants. Will Graham was dead. Long live Rudolph Strand.

“I’m not sure I’m fit to hold a class these days,” Will remarked. “There’s a certain level of acceptable cruelty in dealing with FBI trainees that I don’t think would fly at your average liberal arts college.”

Amid the papers, Will came across a marriage license. He studied it, then smirked.

“Especially since I seem to be married to a doctor.”

“A psychiatrist,” Hannibal corrected offhandedly. “It’s not terribly creative, I know. My last career change ended a bit dramatically, and I thought it might be nice to return to psychiatric work for a while.”

“I’m not talking about your occupation, Hannibal.”

“Ah. Well.” A shrug. “It makes a lot of paperwork easier if we’re already married. As I said, this isn’t my first escape.”

“You don’t strike me as the marrying kind, _Dr. Strand_.” Will shot him a coy look and let his eyes go round under his lashes. He deliberately drew out the syllables of Hannibal’s new name into full, refined sounds. Practice told him how Hannibal would react to that; experience told him how to return in kind. “It’s also traditional to ask the other person first.”

Hannibal closed the suitcase. He latched it, set it aside, and offered Will an amused smirk. “From the first moment man was able to impose his morality on others through law, every culture developed its own marriage practices. Marriage itself is just a means of simplifying property division and establishing bloodlines. It’s efficient, if archaic.”

“I can see why you’ve never been married.”

“Holy matrimony, however, privileges purity and virtue over practicality. It produces spoiled children and sexless marriages, all in the name of a bored and jealous God. And I see no more need to invite God into my affairs than I do in anything else.”

“Even if it’s just about property, it still applies to us. Don’t we belong to each other?”

Will set the papers down on the nightstand and stretched out across the bed. Slowly, leaning back onto his elbows, mindful of the way Hannibal’s eyes followed him. Hannibal betrayed nothing, even if his deepening pupils said otherwise.

“The idea of ownership requires boundaries. One person subjugating another person in order to maintain control over them,” Hannibal said. “We don’t have boundaries. We’re…fluid.”

“So the idea of owning me doesn’t entertain you in the least?” Will’s laugh was clipped and incredulous. “Because I have a few scars that would say otherwise.”

“I never said that it didn’t.”

Hannibal climbed into bed to join Will. He pressed Will’s thighs apart to sit between them, then pressed Will onto his back. One hand drew Will’s wrists together to hold them against the sheets while the other curled fondly around the base of Will’s throat. The act, itself, was symbolic. Neither hand effectively restrained Will, but he let himself be held down regardless. There was a sense of comfort in accepting the loss of control, the animal strength of Hannibal’s body.

Shadows settled over Hannibal’s face and made his eyes look black. He studied Will for a moment, their mouths close enough to touch, but didn’t kiss him the way Will expected. Then he drew his fingers tighter to Will’s throat, squeezing hard enough to startle. Will sucked in a stuttered breath and felt his entire body flood with heat. It seemed to please Hannibal.

“You’re far too wild a thing to ever truly be owned, Will,” he said, his voice honeyed when he spoke. “I knew from the beginning that you would never be caught by conventional means.”

“So you lured me to you instead?” Will canted his head and observed the long lines of Hannibal’s body. Every muscle was wound tight under the skin, set to snap into action. He wet his lips. “Just baited the trap and waited for me to come along?”

“Hardly.” Hannibal’s smirk was deceptively boyish. He squeezed again, firm enough to choke Will into a prolonged silence, then relaxed. “I earned you.”

The pressure coiled Will’s body up like a spring. He arched under Hannibal’s hands, as much for the bruising pain of the grip as the sudden, dizzy elation that followed immediately after Hannibal released it. Squeezing, then releasing, all the while lovingly watching Will’s eyes flutter shut and his mouth open in futile gasps. It never occurred to Will to escape, or even to struggle.

It was in such a strange and euphoric moment that Hannibal let go of Will, choosing instead to stroke his flush face soothingly. Will’s freed hands snared Hannibal by the hair to drag him in to kiss, panting between their lips and teeth as he fought to catch his breath. Hannibal laughed softly at his eagerness, a low, pleased little rumble that Will could feel rather than hear. Calmly and with naked affection, Hannibal kissed away Will’s ferocity. He scooped Will up in arms that Will knew were strong from rending other bodies apart and held him. Will held onto Hannibal in kind, and closed his eyes at the warmth of Hannibal’s breath in his hair.

“Tomorrow we’ll be gone from here,” Hannibal said. “We’ll start over, exactly as we were meant to. And I will protect you from anyone who tries to take you from me again.”

Will swallowed. His throat was bruised in a lattice of angry red marks and his mouth felt swollen from kissing. Finally, he said, “Marriage is an inept description for what we have spilling out of us.”

“Yes,” Hannibal agreed. “It is.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> After quite a bit of soul-searching, I chose to leave Bedelia alive after the post-credit scene. In various interviews regarding the scene, Bryan Fuller seemed to have intended for her to survive into the fourth season, although to what end we won't know. Personally I find it more interesting to leave the issue ambiguous in order to explore just who is and isn't killable within Will and Hannibal's newly combined ethical parameters, and keep Bedelia on the hook for a while.


	3. Chapter 3

The unreality of France settled over the world like a shroud. It had something to do with the way things smelled, Will decided. How differently the sunlight felt on his skin wherever he went. How groundless he felt on strange soil with such a deep, black gulf still seething at his back. It didn’t help that his French was lousy. The only time he ever used it was when he was still a cop, living in New Orleans. Even then, it was just a handful of polite phrases that crept into conversation from time to time. And there were so many lifetimes between then and now, it may as well have happened to someone else.

The cliff, the shore, and the miles of quiet roads that followed had left him taut like wire. He had shed his old skin in favor of the claws and fangs better suited to creatures. Paris was a very enclosed, very busy, very human space, and it made sense that Hannibal would want to be there. Hannibal got lost in sensory things like that. He delighted in the tactility of objects and architecture, art and people. Will was a better fit for the silence found among tall trees and empty fields, places with wide porches and miles of isolation on either side of them. Will craved removal, the subtraction of himself from larger and more complex equations.

 But after ten mornings of waking in another country – in a real bed, in a real house – he began to feel human again.

They were free, but only just. The urge to run was still profound and bone-deep; the realization that they could start over as Hannibal said was lumbering and slow to arrive. Shadows didn’t loom quite so closely on the other side of the ocean. Here, eyes didn’t linger on their backs with the same insistence, and Will found himself thumbing the handle of his knife less frequently. Its weight was still a comfort, but not the same necessary distraction it had been before. Still Will didn’t want to leave the house for the first few days. He was content to stay indoors, and sleep, and watch the city through windows while he figured out the greater shape of things.

There were no dragons left in the world, after all, but there were still those who wanted to see beasts slain.

Hannibal remained charmed by Will’s vigilance. He was satisfied with their tidy sum; he showed it in the quiet, affectionate way that put his hands on Will, as he might to soothe a nervous house pet. Will couldn’t help but feel that he was being placated, to some extent or another. Like a barking dog left to run the end of its chain before getting yanked back, reminded of its place at its owner’s feet. It should have irritated him more than it did, but Will was glad that it didn’t.

 Perhaps Hannibal had been right. Perhaps Will had been domesticated – no, he remembered, the word used was _earned_. Hannibal said he had been _earned_ , as though he were a thing worth earning. Owning he understood well. Anything of value could be owned. His empathy disorder made him valuable to Jack Crawford. The promise of love, understanding, and companionship made him valuable to Hannibal. But to be something worth earning – to be worth suffering for, bleeding for, killing for – that was strange.

Even for it, he no longer felt the need to bite or scratch the hand that fed him. He was content to stay, to sit with Hannibal as he read during the day, and to lie beside him at night. To be as close as their atoms permitted, his head on Hannibal’s shoulder while he dozed, or their fingers laced together. Guardedly at first, mindful of the opposing construction of bone and ligament, then certainly. Naturally.

It was the safest he felt in years.

\--

On the eleventh day, Will had a very stupid idea. He ventured out to a shop that he had seen from the window, spurred by a sudden compulsion that felt not at all his own. He bought what he came for, fumbling politely through what little French he remembered, and squirreled the object away as not to be found. If he regretted it at all, he decided not to give himself the time for it, and quietly got back into bed before Hannibal realized he had left.

\--

In France, Will was indeed cared for. He haunted the house that Hannibal had provided, wandering among its lavish rooms until he felt secure in his surroundings. The house had appeared as promised, and as if out of thin air. The stubborn inclination to question such feats died away when Will thought back to the vast lands and dark, drafty halls of Lecter Castle; an estate long abandoned, but of which Hannibal was the sole living heir.

It was a peculiar thought to have in this context. Before he was as used to thinking of Hannibal as something that had occurred in the world, naturally and chaotically, the way a storm might appear at sea to ravage the shore. Even though Will had been to Lecter Castle some years ago, the thought that Hannibal truly came from somewhere – had grown up, and had been born soft and pink in a hospital – never occurred to him in any meaningful way. He knew about Mischa, and the _before_ and _after_ , but he never asked what had surrounded that moment in time. They were alike in that they didn’t so much have proper beginnings as they did stories they didn’t tell, or only half-told. These were things to do with boatyards and caskets, cages and empty rooms, hidden within memory palaces behind doors with heavy brass locks.

Their endings were more important in those hazy, bloody years before the fall. The endings hadn’t yet been written, and both of them were scrambling to have the decisive word. Now, on the other side of the ocean, there was time, and silences that could be filled with things like that.

True to Hannibal’s character, the house he gave Will was far bigger than anything two men would ever need. Before Will could protest the obscene amount of space, Hannibal was already buying a harpsichord and an expansive collection of books for the study. Hannibal chose the furniture, the drapes, the contents of the kitchen, and the painting of _Leda and the Swan_ above the mantle in the cavernous formal dining room. Will chose the rug in the foyer, the clothes in his side of the closet, the aftershave on the bathroom counter (the one with the little ship on the bottle), and a border collie named Harrison with a slate merle coat.

Hannibal was as offended by the aftershave as he was the rug and the dog. Will said he would, quite happily, leave with all three. Harrison and the rug stayed. The aftershave ended up in the trash.

Paris still felt like a strange fit against the skin he now wore. Will found that he missed having land to tend to and boat motors to fiddle with. He also knew that Hannibal was too social (if peculiar) a creature for the kind of quiet, remote life that Will needed, so he accepted the city as best he could manage. It could be a lonely kind of place if one knew where to look, and soon Will began putting Harrison on the leash to leave with the express intent of getting lost. After a while, he stopped trying to categorize the people that he encountered by who was or wasn’t killable. He didn’t stop looking over his shoulder, but the instinct became less material over time.

That was why, Will knew, they would had to have the conversation sooner rather than later.

\--

“If this is going to work between us, we need to establish some boundaries.”

Will decided to broach the topic on a day warm enough to sit on the veranda, while Hannibal was sketching and he was reading. The veranda sat just off the study and opened it to fresh air and sun, their opposing chairs seated in the shade on either side of the door. Hannibal glanced up from his drawing and reached for the nearby scalpel.

“Historically you and I don’t do so well with boundaries,” he remarked. “We have a habit of spilling over them, or ignoring them entirely.”

Will closed his book. It was a well-worn edition of Hemingway that had found its way into Hannibal’s vast library, among many other books that Will recognized were meant for him. “I don’t mean in our relationship. I’m well-aware everything we do is objectionable in most cases, and illegal in several others.”

“I hope you don’t mean physically then, either.” Sharpening his pencil, Hannibal smirked. “Unless you wish to experiment. In which case, I would suggest investing in a safe word.”

“I don’t need a safe word. The hunting knife I keep under the pillow works just fine. And that’s not what I’m talking about. We need to establish boundaries regarding our… _extracurricular activities_.”

“You and I haven’t killed anyone since we slayed the Dragon together. Unless you’re hiding bodies you aren’t telling me about– which I know you aren’t – I would say our activities are entirely under control.”

“Are you anticipating more bodies?”

“Are you not?”

Will shrugged. “I can live with bodies.”

“And yet you wish to establish boundaries on the very acts you claim to be so comfortable with.”

“ _And yet_ I feel compelled to mitigate unnecessary casualties.”

After a pause, Hannibal returned to his sketch. “You’re referring to the Verger-Bloom family, I presume. You know I made Alana a promise.”

“I’m not comfortable with that kind of promise.”

“Which is wildly hypocritical, given that you were the one who insisted that we dine with my psychiatrist before we left Baltimore.”

“That was different,” Will argued. “Bedelia is still very much alive – maybe not kicking, but alive. I only wanted to make a point.”

“Your point. Not mine.”

“Everyone got what they wanted from Bedelia. There’s nothing to gain from harming Alana, Margot, or their son. And I don’t think I’m being unreasonable to ask that we consult one another about outstanding debts.”

“Alana was my keeper for three years, Will, in case you overlooked the conditions of my captivity,” said Hannibal, without spite or malice. Just a cold report of the facts as presented. “I can assure you, whatever warm and fuzzy memories you may have had of her are not worth bearing in mind. Now, I made her a promise – and like all my promises, I intend to keep it.”

“We don’t kill mothers and their children. I’m taking it off the table.”

The edge in Will’s voice meant the topic was closed for discussion. Hannibal’s changed expression meant that he could tell he had already lost before realizing what was at stake. The pause that followed wasn’t fraught so much as it was uncertain, as they both realized the natural thing to do would have been to go for Will’s throat. Sometimes, even when things were comfortable between them, the urge to do harm – to draw blood – still surged back with bared teeth.

Finally, Hannibal asked, “Then who is still on the table?”

Relief let Will ease back into his chair. “We need to avoid attracting attention to ourselves. But, we agree that we’ll kill anyone who tries to come after us.”

“Of course.”

“Or come between us.”

“I would kill anyone who dared to put their hands on you.”

“And I would do the same.”

“And if you tried to leave me?”

Will considered it. “If I tried to leave you, you would kill me. Just as I would kill you if you ever tried to leave me. And then, I’d imagine, whoever was left would follow along shortly after.”

“Yes,” Hannibal agreed. “Mutually assured destruction.”

Another pause, an unobtrusive silence. Hannibal resumed his sketch. Will drummed his fingers on the armrest for a moment, then stood.

“Wait.”

It was still a dumb idea. He regretted ever having it, but he retrieved the parcel from its hiding place. The small box was skillfully wrapped in bone-white paper and twine. He set it on the end table beside Hannibal’s pencils and scalpels, unable to place it in the other man’s hand.

“I got that a while back. I don’t know why,” he felt compelled to explain. “It’s stupid and sentimental – which means you’ll probably love it.”

Hannibal unwrapped the box with measured precision, likely to preserve the thin paper as well as prolong Will’s uncomfortable fidgeting. Inside was a teacup, pale and delicate when Hannibal held it up to inspect. Will sighed.

“It’s stupid,” he said again. “I just thought, after everything, it – it just made sense?”

Hannibal’s expression was unreadable. Then he threw the teacup across the study, watching it shatter and fly apart. He looked incredibly pleased by the clatter that it made. Will was relieved by that, too.

“Perfect,” was all Hannibal said.

\--

Hannibal promised to show Paris to Will. A boyhood spent attending boarding schools in the city had made him keen to return, buoyed by the kind of earnest nostalgia that Will couldn’t help but be amused by. He took Will to museums to observe art and galleries to buy it. They went to symphony halls and opera houses with histories of their own, winding anecdotes that came sometimes from books, sometimes from other lifetimes. Whether sitting in cafes or strolling the Sunday markets on Boulevard Richard Lenoir, it was getting easier all the time to forget about the trail of the dead and mutilated that lead to their front door.

 _Happy_ wasn’t the appropriate adjective to describe what Will was feeling at any precise moment. _Content_ functioned well enough; so did _safe_ and _cared-for_ , which he was. But in time, and with broader context, an argument could be made for _happy_.

\--

There was to be a performance of Felix Mendelssohn’s _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_ at Salle Pleyel, and Hannibal wanted to attend. Such events required nice suits and conversations with nice people. That was Hannibal’s domain. He enjoyed the sport of inserting himself into elite social circles, whether through charm, intellect, or both, until people were all but eating out of his hand. It was like hunting, but safer, and with much less collateral damage. But the silver ring on Will’s left hand made it his – or rather, Rudolph Strand’s – domain in kind.

In public, this was his role: the adoring husband, the permanent fixture at Dr. Strand’s arm. His limited grasp of the language spared him the brunt of most uncomfortable small talk but he had to be agreeable, and smile, and not look as though he was actively avoiding eye contact. Eyes, on either side of the ocean, were still distracting. They made him acutely aware of his scars in ways he never was at home, as visible as they were on his forehead and either cheek. Scars required lies to explain them away: car crashes, climbing accidents, unfortunate birth marks. Regardless of the story that needed telling, the hand on his back – or his wrist, or his shoulder – steadied him. It held him in place, like an anchor, and reminded him to whom he was tethered.

So Will put on the shirt (dark blue, complementary to his eyes as he was informed) and suit (slim, black, and bespoke) that Hannibal laid out for him. He put on his glasses, pointedly refused the tie he was offered, and accompanied Hannibal to the symphony. Dr. and Mr. Strand arrived, said hello to whoever needed to be told (Hannibal had introduced Will to his collection of for-show associations, but Will couldn’t recall their names if asked), and found their seats on the balcony. Hannibal preferred center orchestra, but the balcony was smaller, quieter, and occupied by fewer people. Will was grateful for it.

Once the performance began, and despite his best intentions, Will’s mind began to wander. As it often did, feeling out of place in Hannibal’s performative arena. He watched Hannibal rather than the orchestra below, his gaze shifting to observe the act of observing. There was comfort in the watching, the fond sort of voyeurism that came from enjoying another person’s presence, even at odd angles. In time, Hannibal caught him in the act.

“Are you enjoying yourself?”

Will smiled reflexively. “I’m not _not_ enjoying myself.”

“Is it really so terrible?” Hannibal chuckled, then said, by means of a compromise, “I won’t force you to come next time, if you don’t want to.”

“No, it’s fine. It’s nice. I’m just poor company for this sort of thing.”

“I know. You’d rather be outside working on a boat motor. I accepted that about you some time ago.”

“Well, I appreciate you overlooking my flaws.”

“When the performance is over, please head home without me. I’ll join you shortly.”

The abrupt change of subject took Will aback for a moment. “Why?”

“I have a colleague I promised I would meet with after the symphony, and I would hate for you to have to leave the dog unattended for too long.”

“I’ll walk Harrison when I get back. And I can play nice for your friends, Hannibal. I’ve managed so far.”

“It’s not that.” Before Will could say anything else, Hannibal took Will’s hand. He brought it up to his mouth to gently kiss Will’s knuckles. “Please. I won’t be out long.”

As asked, Will let it die there. He returned home alone, where Harrison eagerly greeted him at the door. Once changed out of his suit, he put Harrison on the leash and took him for his evening walk. The unease he felt was misplaced; he knew this as certainly as he knew the opposing train of thought could also be true. He wasn’t used to being sent away. Separated, by the work day that Hannibal spent to the office and Will spent at home, but never dismissed. There wasn’t an appropriate word to describe what they were to one another, but Will knew he had earned more consideration than that. Dismissal was for lapdogs.

In another time, in another life, such thoughts wouldn’t have made him so uncomfortable. There were people in those other lives he led: his friends and later his family, occupying the open spaces in the tiny world he built for himself. Now he and Hannibal only had one another, and that made his world a very finite place. Had he miscalculated the shape of their relationship? Had he pushed too hard? He hadn’t asked Hannibal to abandon his essential nature, no more than Hannibal had resented Will for remaining faithful to his own.

Perhaps it was nothing, and perhaps he had made a mistake. Mistakes led to people bleeding on the floor. He wasn’t afraid of such a bleak eventuality, but their shared history had a habit of repeating itself at inopportune moments.

When Will came home again, Hannibal was waiting for him. A third person was with him: living, whole, and bound to a chair in the center of the living room. The man was conscious, screaming into the tape covering his mouth. Will didn’t recognize him, but he immediately recognized the pragmatism of the plastic laid out to protect the hardwood floors. Hannibal had the time to compose the scene before changing into something less formal, less delicate in terms of blood stains. He still looked somewhat scandalized by Will’s arrival, off guard but not unready.

Harrison barked and jerked on his leash. Will silenced him with a low whistle before letting him off the lead.

“Hello, dear,” Hannibal said. “I didn’t expect you back so soon. I had hoped to surprise you.”

Will felt reassured at first. Then confused, and finally hurt. And hurt was something Will was never very good at handling.

“What is this?”

“Your surprise.”

“We agreed we wouldn’t do anything to expose ourselves.”

“I’ve done nothing to expose us. I assure you – I exercised every precaution in bringing him here.”

“Strange men bound and gagged in our living room is the polar opposite of precaution. This is inviting the police to our doorstep.” Once Will was on, he couldn’t shut it off. “I asked you not to do this, Hannibal. I’ve barely asked anything of you since we’ve been together, and you can’t even give me your word not to throw everything we have away. And for what?”

“Will.” Hannibal placed his hands on Will’s shoulders to squeeze them. “If I could get a word in edgewise?”

Will took a deep breath, tried to settle himself. “What?”

“You’ve come far in our short time together,” Hannibal softly explained. “And I’m so very proud of you. I simply wanted to demonstrate that.”

A pause. Will swallowed. “You did this for me?”

“Yes. I wanted to give you a gift to reciprocate the ones you’ve given me.” A half-smile, small and affectionate. “After all, you’ve been so vigilant about protecting our little family – you deserve more than just my gratitude. But for now I can offer you this.”

“I thought you were angry with me.” The confession was useless now, but it still clawed out of Will to be spoken aloud. “When you sent me away.”

“Why would I be angry?”

“I’ve been…pushy, with you. About all of this.”

“And I accepted that about you some time ago, as well.”

The man was still screaming behind the tape. Will eyed him cautiously for a moment before he allowed himself to approach.

“Who is he?”

“His name is Edgar Fournier. He’s one of my patients,” Hannibal said. “Our friend Edgar suffers from a compulsive, violent rage which he feels necessary to take out on his wife and their young son. He’s planning to leave his wife for his secretary, Hilde. Hilde is already pregnant, from what I understand. You can imagine what will come of her and her child.”

Pressing his lips together to wet them, Will watched Edgar writhe in the chair. Studying the terror, the pain, and the way he struggled against his restraints until the exposed skin at his wrists chaffed bright red. It intrigued him, the way a trapped mouse would intrigue a cat.

“You said that we didn’t kill mothers and their children, Will,” Hannibal continued. “I can live with that decision, because you asked me to. But does your compassion extend to the men that terrorize mothers and their children?”

Will shook his head. “No. It doesn’t.”

“Good. Because I caught him for you.”

“You didn’t hunt him. You chose him.”

“A reasonable compromise. I knew you would rather kill someone who wouldn’t be missed than someone who would. Edgar will not be missed.”

The promise settled like heat in the base of Will’s spine. “Will you kill him with me?”

“No.” Hannibal stepped close. His breath was warm on the back of Will’s neck, lips and teeth drawn close enough to kiss the tender flesh. Instead he put his hand on Will’s shoulder, tracing the length of Will’s arm and the back of his hand to place the blade between his fingers. “This is yours, my darling boy. Do with him what you wish.”

The blade in Will’s hand was a welcomed feeling. His heart was steady as he considered the jumbled, terrified collection of tendons, bones, and nerve endings that made up Edgar Fournier. The mechanical rhythm of his own pulse made the room feel black and infinite, as everything else simply washed away in the sound of the blood coursing through him. Will wanted to look inside of Edgar, he finally decided, and perched himself on Edgar’s wide-set knees to examine him up close. He took the other man by the hair to wrench his head back. This way, he admired the angles of taut musculature beneath the thin skin, the bobbing Adam’s apple, and the throbbing carotid artery.

For just a moment, Will thought about biting Edgar’s neck. He thought about ripping the artery out with his teeth the way he saw Hannibal do to Dolarhyde. To taste him for himself: blood and flesh, light and breath. But that, he knew, was too intimate a gesture to waste on someone like this. Instead he pierced Edgar’s gut first, deep and to the hilt, and drew the blade up his torso to splay him wide. The other man thrashed as blood pooled thick and dark in the plastic under the chair. Will pierced him once more, this time to cut into the meat of Edgar’s throat. The head lolled back where the neck was nearly split, the interior structure laid open by a gaping horizontal wound. Even more blood spewed from the opened artery – first in an arc and then a stream, all running downwards to join the rest.

Finally Will untangled himself from the gurgling, convulsive remains of Edgar Fournier and felt his blood hum inside of his veins. He kicked the chair back onto the floor to let the gore settle into Edgar’s chest cavity as the man bled dry, red filling the outstretched plastic. The sounds of his dying were like a stuttering clockwork, a failing system choked on its own broken pieces. It pleased Will in some dark, bone-deep way that tasted like copper and antler velvet if he thought about it long enough.

Knowing Hannibal was watching pleased him, too. Hannibal, who looked so fondly upon Will’s work, brushed his fingers down Will’s cheek to catch the blood smeared across it. If fear had made Will’s body taut like wire, then the pleasure of killing a man had cut it in two. He kissed Hannibal, deeply and thoroughly, dropping the blade to rest in the blood it had spilt and clutch Hannibal’s body to his.

“Did you enjoy yourself?” Hannibal asked.

Will swallowed again, then nodded. “Yes.”

“Good.”


	4. Chapter 4

They had made a game of things, slowly and over time. Will couldn’t say for sure whose idea it was, his or Hannibal’s. The practice had unfolded naturally without either of them speaking of it specifically, having become something of a routine, among many others. Gifts given back and forth, sometimes on greeting card holidays but often spontaneously, _just because_. Normal people gave one another cards or flowers; their gifts were of an altogether bloodier sort.

 The game had rules, of course. Will meant what he said about not attracting attention to themselves, regardless of their more troublesome impulses. The rules were simple. They couldn’t hunt on a set schedule, or anything resembling a schedule. (This precluded social events or dinner parties.) Hunting grounds could had to be varied and diverse, and they couldn’t hunt in the same area twice. Whomever they caught couldn’t be missed, so they had to be selective to avoid collateral damage. (Discourtesy, while compelling, was rarely grounds enough for murder these days.) They couldn’t tell each other when they were hunting, and they couldn’t hunt at the same time, either.

Most importantly, they had to use every viable part of whatever they caught, and they could leave no evidence behind. No calling cards or signatures; nothing that could be figured into a profile or case study. The game didn’t allow for monument-making. There could be no public installations or centerpieces, no artfully mutilated corpses. Such things would only get them into trouble, and they had been too careful to jeopardize that peace now. The gift itself, and the hunt to capture it, had to be sport enough.

As long as they each complied with this simple framework, the game was on.

This round belonged to Will. It was his to win or lose, but he was certain Hannibal would be pleased with his gift. He had been very careful with this one: whole, unharmed, and laid unconscious with sedatives. He even arranged his catch on the dining room table as though asleep, the limbs posed tranquilly, like a saint. It seemed fitting, in an appropriately sacrilegious sort of way. Fear would have tainted the meat, made it bitter to taste. Will wouldn’t have noticed it but he knew Hannibal would, and he wanted to be sure to preserve this one in perfect condition.

Perhaps, Will could admit, the game made him competitive. He didn’t like to make mistakes, and sometimes he went a little too far. Instincts could be a volatile thing; they required tempering and a steady hand to soundly navigate their ebb and flow. He always thought himself in control, but he could still be a little too ferocious for his liking, breaking bones to let marrow escape, or leaving deep bruises. Hannibal never chastised him for his savagery, rapt as he was by the warm splash of blood across Will’s face or staining his fingers.

Even for it, he still felt compelled to correct that in himself – to be better. Where Hannibal was concerned, Will aimed to please above all else.

Catching this one, however, was a very cogent matter of responsibility. The prey in question liked to brutalize children in ways that didn’t leave marks behind. To Will’s dismay, he hid the evidence of his crimes so sloppily that catching him almost felt like mercy. Too depraved to be left on the loose, too stupid to cover his own tracks, and too weak to survive in prison if captured by the authorities first. No one would miss this one when he was gone, nor would there be anything left to miss. It was ethical butchery.

The front door opened at 6:05 pm, like clockwork. When Hannibal walked into the dining room, Will was waiting for him, perched expectantly on the edge of the table.

“Tag,” Will said. “You’re it.”

For it, Hannibal smiled. “I’ll get my bone saw.”

\--

The changing season brought its chill. Nights grew long and dark, and life become quiet. Quiet was a relative concept, but a welcomed one nonetheless. Will added another log to the fire in the bedroom’s modest hearth, pausing to warm his hands before padding on bare feet back to bed. He paused again to ruffle Harrison’s soft fur as the dog slept at the foot of the bed. Then he slid off the shirt he had worn to brave the cold and crawled under the comforter to reclaim the place beside Hannibal. There their bodies fit together in the complementing angles of arms and ribcages.

“I still think it’s idiotic to have to buy firewood.” Will rested his head on Hannibal’s chest and murmured against his skin to speak. The sound of Hannibal’s heart and lungs – blood and breath – was soothing in a peculiar, instinctive sort of way. “I spent my whole life chopping it myself just fine until you came along.”

“You can take the huntsman out of the forest, but not the other way around.” Hannibal closed an arm around Will, to stroke a hand through his hair. “Do you wish to return to more a rural lifestyle? A house in the countryside, perhaps?”

“ _Huntsman_ is too strong a word, but…yes, I do. At some point. Although I don’t think you’re quite suited for a rural lifestyle, Hannibal.”

“Hush. I have you to chop our firewood and fish for our supper.”

“And to stoke the home fires, and warm your bed.”

Hannibal chuckled. “Precisely. I defer to your expertise in keeping us fed and sheltered.”

Will could hear from the change in Hannibal’s breathing that he had closed his eyes to sleep. Hannibal always fell asleep before Will did. It was the last of the bad habits Will had picked up while they were on the run, listening for odd sounds or watching for lights through the windows. It always made him feel better to keep watch for the extra hour, a hand resting on the knife he kept under the pillow. Watching Hannibal sleep.

Absently, he titled his head to examine the planes of Hannibal’s chest and stomach. His fingers traced their definition in the slopes and valleys where bone peaked under skin, then disappeared into the waistband of Hannibal’s sleep bottoms. They felt for the familiar scars, like reading Braille. They recognized the bullet wound in Hannibal’s stomach, the pale pink stripe of a knife wound beneath his armpit, and the shallow scores that had found homes for themselves between bones. Each told a familiar, violent story.

Without looking, Will could count the mark on Hannibal’s cheek, the brand on his back, and the thick corded tissue on each of his forearms (from when Will had sent Matthew Brown to bleed him) among Hannibal’s collection of scars. Just as sleep was beginning to settle in, his fingers encountered a mark on Hannibal’s side, beneath the twelfth rib. It was a fine, raised pucker of skin, well faded and white with time. He didn’t remember putting it there, and he hadn’t remembered seeing it before, either. He would’ve recalled something like that.

“Where did this come from?”

Hannibal stirred, lifting a hand to place over Will’s. “When I was a young man,” he answered, voice dark with sleep. “It’s the consequence of a bowie knife and a misguided affair, I’m afraid.”

“How misguided?”

“Enough to scar. I wasn’t as cautious in my youth as I am now. It was a harsh but necessary lesson.”

“When I think of you, cautious is not the word that leaps to mind.”

“No, perhaps not.” Hannibal chuckled again, this time a softer, huskier sound against Will’s cheek. “Where you’re concerned, I’ve never been cautious.”

“I’ve been told I bring out the worst in you.”

Will traced the scar with the edge of his thumb, traveling east to west and back. He considered the soft arc of it, the intimacy of sticking someone with a blade so long without the intention of plunging it to the hilt. The compassion required to keep from doing so.

“That night, at the cliffs,” Will started to say, before he could think to stop himself. He spoke slowly and softly, like a secret meant to be buried in Hannibal’s skin. “I had intended to kill you. Or I thought I had intended to kill you. I convinced myself that I had. That I would make it stick that time.”

He hadn’t even thought about it in months. Once they awoke on the shore, alive and whole, there was no time to entertain contradictory thoughts. They had survived, and so they had to run. They hadn’t died, and so they were to be together. There was no room left for doubt or second guessing in their world now.

Hannibal said, “I know,” and resumed stroking Will’s hair. “I always knew. You would have allowed the Dragon to kill me, or you would have killed me yourself. Either way, you would have been victorious.”

“And that doesn’t strike you as misguided?” Will asked. No remorse or malice, just curiosity.

“I don’t fear death, Will. Rather, I find it comforting. I would have been happy to have had you for a day,” said Hannibal, warm and clear and matter-of-fact, “than to remain without you.”

Listening to Hannibal breathe, Will let sleep take him.

\--

Will blamed his own morbid curiosity for discovering the _TattleCrime_ article. He spotted the translated print edition at the market one afternoon, shopping to restock the pantry with Hannibal’s requested supplies. The sight of the flimsy, cheaply printed tabloid struck him cold; it was a severe reminder of an entire world on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean that had gone on without him in it. His surprise gave way to a ghoulish sort of interest, which then morphed into profound offense as he thumbed through the pages and spotted himself in the centerfold article. The language barrier between English and French didn’t mitigate his irritation as the out-of-date photos of himself and Hannibal filled in the gaps in his understanding.

This was one of those moments that Will regretted, in some small way, not killing Freddie Lounds when the opportunity presented itself. He put the tabloid back, paid for his groceries, and went home to check the website in a fit.

Even in the months since they first went on the run, Freddie was still milking the Red Dragon story for all it was worth. The initial headlines from the days after the Dragon died were the splashiest. There were covert snapshots of the crime scene at the cliffs and the roadside carnage at the site of Hannibal’s escape, supplemented by tasteless photos of blood pools and broken glass from the inside of the house. Details of the case were broadly elaborated upon, if not completely fabricated outright, as Freddie ambushed the FBI and local police for any and all gory specifics. His and Hannibal’s disappearances and the ensuing manhunt kept commenters busy for weeks, fanning the flames with wild speculation and alleged sightings.

Vancouver, Berlin, and Marathon Key – they were apparently very busy, and very well-traveled.

“ _Murderous lovers spotted in Montreal? Police baffled by ritualistic killings, anonymous sources say._ ” Will paced the study irritably, reading the latest headline from his tablet. “Is she seriously going to play _Pin the Tail on the Cannibal_ every time one of these crackpots sends her a theory?”

At his desk, Hannibal listened on. He couldn’t keep the amused look off his face, much to Will’s chagrin. “It’s certainly vulgar to trade on our names, but you have to admit – she is giving us a great deal of credit.”

“Of course you would enjoy the attention.”

“It’s sometimes nice to have admirers.”

“It helps that this is practically a love letter to your immeasurable ego.”

“Will, darling, put down the tablet. You’ve become masochistic.”

“Then it’s a good thing I married a sadist,” Will said dryly, scrolling through another rash of inflammatory article comments. “And I’ve moved beyond self-flagellation – now I’m squarely in utter contempt. According to this, we make love amid the corpses of our victims.”

“Well,” Hannibal chuckled, “I never considered trying that.”

Will scoffed. “Nor will you, thank you very much.”

\--

“Tell me, Will,” Hannibal said one night over dinner. They sat across from one another at the long formal dining table, the space around them warmed by the soft glow of candlelight. “What do you think about when you think about the future?”

Tonight was roasted lamb with artichokes and lemons in anchovy-herb oil. (The recipe had called for lamb, in any case.) They prepared it together, as they did most meals, because Hannibal had taken a vested interest in teaching Will how to cook. Each night, he came home from work with a recipe in mind, rolled up his sleeves, and led Will into the kitchen to start dinner.

The dishes were all modest at first; small meals with simple ingredients, just until Will became comfortable enough to trust his own judgment. Will wasn’t very good at it, by his own measure; his expertise started and stopped with fish, which he had acquired a knack for cooking as a fisherman. But he had become something of a proficient sous chef, with some practice under his belt, and Hannibal guiding his hand. There was something comforting in the ritual of it, a sense of safety in its intimacy. Living like other people lived.

Will took a sip of wine and considered his response. “I wasn’t aware that we were thinking about the future. It feels like we just finished putting the past to bed.”

“To think about the future is to reflect on the past,” Hannibal said. “They’re often linked. History doesn’t repeat itself in the literal sense, but it provides a benchmark against which to measure one’s expectations.”

A shrug. “I don’t much think about the future. Or I haven’t, really. Either I’ve been consumed by what’s immediately in front of me, or I don’t see myself making it far enough into the future to plan for it.” That wasn’t strictly true of his life now, but it was factual enough. “What do you think about?”

“When I think about our future, I always think about our past as well. I have to consider how we got here in the first place before we can decide where it is we’re going.”

“It was a long and bloody road,” Will summarized bluntly. “With a lot of potholes.”

“But it wasn’t always so painful,” Hannibal said. He sounded hopeful; enough that Will regretted responding as curtly as he had. “There were moments of pleasure – of friendship. Bright moments in the dark.”

“Of course. Past behavior doesn’t predict future outcomes.”

“No, I know well enough that you are impossible to predict.”

“I don’t dwell on the past,” Will offered, shifting away from the topic. He tested the shape of this conversation in his head and didn’t like the look of it, where it was headed. “And if – or rather _when_ – I think of the future, I see myself here. If not here specifically, then maybe somewhere else like it – in some little house, with big yard and a wide porch. But we’re together.”

“Best case scenario?”

“The only case I’m interested in.”

“Is that what you foresee, or is this what you want?”

“Yes.”

Hannibal smiled. Will smiled, in turn.

After dinner, they cleared the table and did the dishes. Will washed the plates, pans, and wine glasses; Hannibal dried them and put each of them away. Afterwards, Hannibal entwined Will’s hand in his and led him to the bath. Will didn’t protest. He had become accustomed to Hannibal’s peculiarities, and the way he kept a lover as meticulously as he kept a house. In time, he found himself comfortable with the keeping.

As Will undressed, he was aware of Hannibal watching him from the doorway. His fingers deliberately paused over buttons to draw out the performance, straightening his posture, leveling his scarred shoulders. Faded bullet wounds on either side (one by Jack and another by Chiyoh) provided uneasy symmetry; this contrasted the lopsided accumulation of the scars on his face. Naked, he got into the tub to let the hot water close around him. He bowed his head, held still, and closed his eyes. The act made him acutely aware of all his constituent elements and the sinew that bound them together, bone on bone under the skin.

Exposed, but not vulnerable.

Hannibal sat down on the stool beside the bathtub and washed Will’s body with a warm, wet cloth. He traced the notches of Will’s spine and the dips in his torso in slow and careful circles. It was a ritual in and of itself: to draw patterns across Will’s back with a flattened palm, then move under the water. Along the backs of Will’s hands, over his scarred stomach, and between his thighs. It was such a purely sexless, reverential gesture, one that nevertheless drew Will’s lips apart in a sigh.

Hannibal didn’t say anything; he never did. But his contentment hummed in the lean muscles of his forearms and the fond curl of his fingers around the curves of Will’s body, steadying his breath against Will’s neck. Once Will was clean and rinsed, Hannibal brought the shaving kit from the counter. Without preamble or permission, he tipped back Will’s chin to lather his face and neck. For it, Will sighed, but didn’t deny Hannibal.

“I can shave myself, you know,” he protested, albeit weakly. “I’ve managed it since puberty.”

“I trust you to care for yourself, just as I trust you to recognize the ways I choose to care for you.”

“Am I too scruffy for your liking?” Will watched Hannibal retrieve the straight razor to test its sharpness. He allowed himself his smirk. “Worried what the neighbors must think of you?”

“I’m not concerned with the neighbors. And I like your scruff.” Hannibal leaned in to put the blade to Will’s bare skin. He slowly dragged it along the curve of Will’s throat and up to his chin. “But you’re in a terribly compromising position, and I would be remiss not to take advantage of that while I can.”

Hannibal moved the razor in graceful strokes along Will’s jaw. He wiped the blade on the towel and changed the angle on his return. Will complied with this as well, letting Hannibal’s fingers tilt his chin to a more agreeable direction.

“Been a while since you’ve had a knife to my throat,” Will remarked. “Not sure if I should trust you.”

“We’ve moved past the need of such theatrics. Or, at least, you haven’t given me much reason to indulge them.” Humor tugged at the corner of Hannibal’s mouth. “I’d hate to have to mark your lovely skin any more than I already have.”

Will snorted at that. “So now I’m _lovely_?”

“You are to me.”

“I’m not sure if I should take that as a compliment.”

“You should. It is a compliment.”

Finishing, Hannibal toweled Will’s face with a soft, pleased sound. “There. All done.”

“Feel better?”

“Always.”

As Hannibal stood to tidy up, Will caught him gently by the wrist. He tilted his head to level Hannibal a long, syrupy look.

“Hannibal.” The way he drawled out Hannibal’s name sharpened the other man’s expression. It pleased Will in some warm, dark place to see Hannibal react that way. “Get in the tub.”

“Is that a request or a command?”

Will smirked. “Yes.”

\--

The next round was Hannibal’s. Will awoke one morning to find his gift suspended from the kitchen ceiling, ready to be bled out. They dispatched of him quickly and intimately, and rendered him down with a bone saw.

Hannibal didn’t get a chance to put Freddie Lounds’ accusations to the test, despite his best efforts.

\--

On Friday evening, Will came home early from walking the dog to find the back door already unlocked. Picked, rather, opened behind the shelter of the backyard’s privacy fence and small canopy of trees. Brazen enough to work in daylight hours, with people ambling about the neighborhood. Coming from work, bringing their children home. Brazen but not stupid, because whomever had picked the lock knew what hours Will kept.

They had known when he would be out of the house, when to break in and avoid confrontation. They had studied the area, the street, the comings and goings of the block. And Will hated being studied.

The lights were out. The sounds of another person moving on the other side of the wall sent Harrison into a fit. He raced off the leash to bark at shadows gathered in the hallway beyond the kitchen door. Will immediately regretted not having his knife with him, and kicked himself for falling out of the habit of carrying it. Without it he felt sharply disarmed, even though he knew better. Instead, he drew a carving knife from the counter stand, slipped off his shoes at the door, and moved through the kitchen into the dining room.

The waning light coming through from the dining room windows looked deep blue. It stretched across the floor in broad fields of color and glimmered off the edge of the blade. Harrison yapped and the sound of footfalls changed direction suddenly. Home invasion, burglary – likely an unarmed intruder. Didn’t see the dog when he came in and was startled by Harrison's sudden appearance.

Will tracked the sudden, brisk patter of footsteps as they came into the adjacent hallway. He moved quickly on socked feet to head the intruder off before the other man rounded the corner to exit the way he came in. Coming in from behind, the ensuing scuffle was brief but not altogether unfair. In the dark, he didn’t see the intruder’s slim little blade until it sliced at his forearm, deep enough to draw blood. A lucky blow still put a bruise in Will’s cheek and a ringing in his ears from getting his skull knocked back into the wall.

Lucky – but not smart.

Will didn’t think about biting the other man’s throat until his teeth were already sunk into the skin. They tore at the meat to open the veins underneath, ripping flesh out with them when he pulled back. In his haste, he didn’t think about arterial spray, either, painting the wall and floor in a hot, dark gush of blood. With a scream the intruder dropped the blade. Will stuck his into him instead, angled between the ribs to puncture something soft and vulnerable.

The intruder gurgled and died before Will could turn on the lights to survey the damage. Once it was done, the reality of the moment caught up with him in a crash. It was a dizzy, euphoric sort of feeling, like falling hard and fast. A feverish collision, somewhere within him, deep inside his ribcage and exploding outward. He sat on the floor and caught his breath, still tasting the blood on his teeth. Harrison emerged from the other end of the hall with a whimper, cautiously sidestepping the gore to sit beside him.

Killing didn’t feel like this. Killing felt brutal and necessary; more than that, it was something to be shared. With Garrett Jacob Hobbs, Hannibal was the inciting incident that led Will to empty his gun into the other man’s chest. Randall Tier was sent by Hannibal for Will to brutalize with his bare hands. Francis Dolarhyde they hunted together, along with every body – every exulting little gift – they shared since. Hannibal’s presence was a welcomed shadow when it came to killing; each death was intimately linked with him, and he stood long-looming in the catacombs of Will’s memory palace.

All except for this one.

This…belonged to Will.

The blood had just finished drying to Will’s face when Hannibal came home at 6:05. He arrived to find the body on the floor and Will sitting beside it, still wearing the evidence of the crime. It was the closest to afraid Will had remembered him seeing in years, if ever. If not afraid, then something cousin to it, like the passing recognition of loss. It didn’t suit him in the least.

“It was a burglar,” Will explained, already feeling apologetic for it. “I came home from walking the dog to find him tossing the house. I may have gotten a little…ahead of myself, for a moment.”

Hannibal removed his gloves to stroke Will’s bloodied cheek. “Are you hurt?”

“It’s not my blood.” Will indulged Hannibal for a moment before standing, taking the offered hand. “He got me pretty good in the jaw, so I had to improvise. Sorry about the mess.”

“Never apologize for doing what is necessary. The floors can be cleaned.”

“What do you want to do? I wanted to wait for you to get home before I tried moving him.”

“Fetch me my bone saw.” Hannibal shed his coat and began to roll up his sleeves. It was righteous anger that Will now recognized in his face. “We’ll render him down and dispose of him.”

Will tilted his head. “Nothing worth saving?”

“This prowler came into my home and threatened what is most precious to me. Trust me, this is already more consideration than he deserves.”

Silently, they took the thief apart piece by piece. The work was slow, sawing through bone and sinew, meat and cartilage. Hands, feet, and head first, and then the rest in piecemeal. Each part was deposited into separate bags to be dumped in a different location; afterwards they scrubbed the floors and walls with oxidized bleach, destroying the blood. Will would have to destroy his clothes, as well, but he would deal with that in the morning.

Once the work was done, Hannibal placed the bags in the false bottom of the chest freezer until they could be properly disposed of. Will washed his hands in the kitchen sink, scrubbing the thick red rings out from under his nails. He would need to shower to get the rest of the blood off, but the warm press at his back pinned him in place. Hannibal’s arms captured Will between them, his palms flat on the counter, his body warm through their clothes where his chest met Will’s back. His mouth was warmer still when he trailed kisses along Will’s neck, jaw, and the corners of his mouth.

“You never look more beautiful to me than when you’ve just taken a life. Shall I describe it to you?”

Will closed his eyes and leaned back against Hannibal’s shoulder. He realized he must still have had blood on his face, as the tip of Hannibal’s tongue darted out against his mouth to taste it. Breathing out, he nodded.

“Yes.”

“Your entire body is flush with heat. Your eyes grow soft under their lids and your pupils dilate until they become black, even in the light. You smell of blood and sweat, but sweeter together than they are separate from one another.”

Hannibal reached up to coil a hand around the base of Will’s neck. His fingers fondly stroked over Will’s throat to follow the pulse, delighting in how it quickened at his touch.

“How did you kill him?”

“With my teeth.”

“How did it make you feel?”

With his free hand, Hannibal began to open Will’s shirt, button by button. His fingers roamed over Will’s chest and stomach, lingering over the jagged, bisecting scar there. Tracing it with the rough edges of his fingertips, as though reliving the act of slicing Will open. For it, Will tipped back his head to capture Hannibal’s mouth in a kiss.

“I felt…excited. Because it meant it belonged to me.” The grip on Will’s throat tightened; his lips parted on a sigh. “How did it make you feel?”

“I was furious that someone was inside our home. More than that, I was furious that something could’ve happened to you.”

“I don’t need to be protected.” The blood on Will’s mouth was proof enough of that.

“You belong to me, Will,” Hannibal said. His voice dipped low and dark, growling on the edges of his consonants. “You’re mine to keep and protect as I see fit.”

“Then show me how.”

As told – and Will liked the thought of it more than he wanted to admit, _as told_ – Hannibal maneuvered him around to grip him by the hips, lifting him up. Will let himself be carried, his arms around Hannibal’s shoulders, legs around Hannibal’s waist, to bed. Hannibal dropped him into the center of the mattress, where he landed on his back. Immediately Hannibal was on him again; Will dragged him close with a handful of hair, enjoying the sound that Hannibal made when he tugged. Kissing and biting, pulling and unbuttoning. The blood had made them both wild, leaving behind bruises and scratches to be carried under clothes in the morning.

Hannibal opened Will on well-oiled fingers; he fucked him first with his hand before he turned Will onto his stomach to fuck him with his cock instead. Their bodies met again as Hannibal pinned Will down to drive into him. Will couldn’t help the sound that he made at the sensation of being filled again, full and deep and vicious. He gripped the sheets in his fists and tried to bury his moan into the pillow. In turn, Hannibal caught him by the hair and pulled his head back.

“No. I want to _hear_ you.”

The pain made Will wince, as did the pleasure of it. He swallowed, trying to focus on that. “How would you have killed him? If I hadn’t gotten to him first?”

“I would have torn him in half,” Hannibal growled against Will’s ear. The hot, wet syllables got lost in Will’s hair, dragging an involuntary shiver out of Will. “No one touches you but me.”

“And if he’d hurt me?” Will asked. He knew the answer, but he wanted to hear it, and to feel it in Hannibal’s swift, punishing thrusts.

“There would have been nothing left of him to find. Because I love you, and I own you.”

And Will felt safe in that knowledge.

\--

“Are you happy, Will?”

Will threw the tennis ball far across the flat green expanse of the park lawn for Harrison to chase. He shrugged as the dog bolted off to fetch it.

“At this precise moment or in a broader, existential sort of way?”

Seated in the grass beside Will, Hannibal smirked at that. “It isn’t a loaded question. Are you happy or aren’t you? Here, with me.”

“I wouldn’t be here if I weren’t.”

“Good.”

The park was quiet on Saturday afternoons. It was occupied by parents with their children and young couples on strolls, holding hands or people-watching. Will liked to take Harrison here on his daily walks. He liked to bring Hannibal with them on the weekends, too; to get out of the house and take advantage of the sunshine. They didn’t talk about the night before; the body in the freezer and the bruises hidden under their clothes spoke volumes.

Harrison returned with the ball. Will ruffled the dog’s coat approvingly, then threw the ball again. In turn he asked, albeit more sheepishly than he had intended, “Are you happy here with me?”

“Of course,” Hannibal answered. “I can’t imagine my life without you in it, nor would I want to.”

Will smiled. “Good.”

Silence settled over them for a moment. Warm and comfortable, like the sunshine, or the fresh air. After a moment, Hannibal spoke again.

“Lately my thoughts have been returning to our discussion about the future, and to family. Or rather, to children.”

Tensing, Will said nothing.

“I know that this is a fraught subject. I wanted to avoid any unnecessary cruelty on my part, but nevertheless I find myself returning to it more and more. And I won’t lie to you, Will.”

“You’ve lied to me before,” Will replied sharply.

“As have you. Which is why I don’t want to travel down that road with you again.”

“It’s a fraught subject, Hannibal, because it implies we can open doors we both know are closed to us.”

“I still want to have a family with you, Will,” Hannibal said, with that hopeful expression Will both loved and loathed sometimes.

“We _are_ a family.”

“A child, then. Ours to raise together.”

“Hannibal.” Will sighed. The thought dredged up needles, the kind that got stuck in his chest and made it hard to speak. “What we are isn’t compatible with raising a child. Children are... fragile. They’re complicated in ways you and I aren’t suited for.”

“Lions are savage hunters, and yet no one would question the lioness’s capacity to nurture her young. Nor would our own instincts make us any less capable of doing so ourselves.”

“Lion cubs aren’t children.”

“No, but they can be raised to become lions just the same.”

“Do you want a child, or a distraction? Because you can’t just set a child aside when it fails to amuse you anymore.”

Hannibal paused. He took a deep breath, as though testing his next sentence very carefully. Will found himself doing the same.

“You and I are orphans, and we have no families to speak of,” Hannibal said, his words slow and cautious. “When we die, we’ll leave nothing behind, and there will be no one to remember us. I don’t fear death, but I now find myself preoccupied with an absence of life, and love. The only way that I know how to fulfill that need is to accept my own biological imperative to have a child. With you.”

“After Abigail, and Walter…” Catching himself picking at old wounds, Will shook his head. “I can’t say that the thought hasn’t crossed my mind. In the abstract, when I allow myself to think that far ahead. And I can’t say that it isn’t a comforting idea, even in the abstract.”

“But you’re unsure if you can trust me with a child.”

“I’m unsure if I can even trust myself with a child.”

“Then what would it take to make you sure?”

It always came down to these moments: compromises, tenuous at best, where blood was underlying every conceivable variable. Something warm and soft and human stood on one side of the question, a chasm of blood and broken bones on the other. It was all at once terrifying and alluring, like standing at the edge of a precipice and looking at the water below. And immediately Will had an answer to the question, but he hated having to put it to words. Hated how vulnerable it made him at that moment, when he wanted nothing more than to forget the past.

“You can’t throw another child away, Hannibal, and you can’t use it as a weapon against me. _Because I would kill you_ if you did that to me again.”

Another pause, and Will was grateful for the silence. When Hannibal spoke again, it was with the pall of remorse, more an appeal than a question.

“If I swore not to harm this child – to love it and protect it, even from the worst in ourselves – would you be willing to have a family with me?”

Will contemplated his answer for a long and fearful moment, then swallowed. “Yes.”


	5. Chapter 5

Hannibal had been composing equations again.

They hadn’t spoken of such matters since the afternoon at the park, when Hannibal asked Will about starting a family. The question was far too grave to commit to an answer off-hand, and Will chose to stall for time until pressed again. Hannibal didn’t, and Will was grateful for it. Hannibal didn’t speak a word of the notebook, either; he jotted down notations whenever he had a few moments to spare, in the study or by the fireplace after dinner. He never shared its contents with Will, but Will didn’t have to ask.

The notebook was already filled with calculations when Will found it, bookmarked by a pen and left open in the study one afternoon. Its pages told of a delicate framework of theorem and probabilities, put to paper in Hannibal’s winding script. Will didn’t understand what the equations stood for but he knew that they were concerned with teacups and time, and gathering up what had been lost. With Abigail, and with Mischa, all the way back to those rooms in Hannibal’s memory palace that were too dangerous to travel through.

There were holes in the floors of those rooms, as Will knew – large enough to fall into if one weren’t cautious of their pitfalls. Where Will was concerned, Hannibal was never cautious. He was without armor, and naked to influence. But, as Will also knew, Hannibal was cautious enough to never communicate of the contents of his notebook, or the rooms such equations could undo. If Hannibal couldn’t bring Mischa back, another child – another substitute – would fill that void. And all Will had to do was give it to him.

It should have been simple, but simple things rarely were.

Will closed the notebook, tucked it against his side along with the book he had come for, and left the study. He didn’t bring it to Hannibal until he was prepared for the conversation that would follow, and the tangled-up things that would spill out as a result. The next day, he summoned the steel required to place the notebook down on the end table beside the sofa where Hannibal sat.

Hannibal looked up from the book he was reading. He smiled, at first, before he saw the notebook. His smile fell away, but he said nothing. Instead he marked his place and set his book aside as Will sat down.

After a moment, Will sighed. “We need to talk.”

“Have you given any further thought to what we discussed?” Hannibal asked.

“I’ve given it a great deal of thought,” Will said. “None of which is in any way cogent. Or useful.”

Hannibal canted his head. “Thoughts are often the shadows of feelings. They’re darker, simpler, and emptier than the true depth of our experiences. If you can’t be sure of what you think, Will, then tell me how you feel.”

“I _feel_ that you’re expecting me to be the rational one in this equation. Unfortunately, you’re asking me to be the rational one on a subject I’ve never been particularly rational about.”

“Families aren’t formed out of rational desires, because the love we feel for our families isn’t rational. The feelings involved are messy and complicated, and defy a satisfying explanation. This is no different with parents and their children.”

“Our lives are messy and complicated,” Will said. “And ill-suited for raising children.”

“Most lives are. You and I are hardly a sensible arrangement, but that doesn’t make what we share any less meaningful.”

Will considered the notebook, careful of how to proceed. “Do you think a child will make our lives more meaningful?”

“I think a child will make our lives more complete than they are now. I also think a child would be good for us, as a family. However, I’m well-aware that this decision does service my motives in other ways, as well.”

“How so?”

Hannibal shrugged. “If we had a child, it would bring us closer together. It would also keep you close to me, because I know you would be far less likely to ever leave me with a child between us.”

“Are you trying to _trap_ me?”

“That’s…an ugly way to put it.”

“Well, it’s an ugly thought to have.” Will sighed again. “You don’t have to trick me into having a child with you, Hannibal. I already find myself deeply attached to this hypothetical child of ours. I picture us with her, raising her – this warm, vague shape of a person. As though I’m mourning someone who was never really there.”

“You’ve pictured yourself with a daughter, then?” Hannibal asked. Will nodded. “In the ancient Greek tradition, the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne gave man the inspiration necessary to create beauty in the world. They also ensured man would remember such beauty, through story and song. A daughter would do much the same for you, I imagine, and would suit you well.”

“Having a child now won’t bring back Abigail,” Will said. Gently, and with regret. “And it won’t bring back Mischa.”

Hannibal paused, and took Will’s hand to hold between his own. “The teacup I shattered gathered itself together again when you chose to stay with me. I will forever be grateful to you for that, and for the family we’ve made together. But there’s still an empty seat at our table, and a silence in our home that could be filled by life and sound. I will always feel that emptiness, and mourn it, in my own way.”

Will swallowed. “A child would make you happy.”

“Your child would be a gift, but, yes. To put it simply. And yet you still worry about the consequences.”

“I worry because this isn’t just a matter of raising a family together. We’re consigning another person to the life we’ve chosen for ourselves. It isn’t fair to bring a child into this, without knowing we’ll be free – or even alive – long enough to raise and protect it.”

It was Hannibal’s turn to sigh. He sat silent for a moment to admire the construction of Will’s hand as he held it. He studied the angles of the knuckles, the fine blue vein under the skin, and the little scars that made homes for themselves there, where few others saw. Then he placed a kiss on the back of it, another on the palm, and threaded their fingers together. The sweetness of it melted whatever strong front Will might have otherwise held.

“I’ve made two promises to you since we’ve been together,” Hannibal said. “Tell me what I promised you.”

“You promised you would protect me,” Will answered. “And you promised you would protect our child, even from the worst in ourselves.”

“Yes. And I always keep my promises.”

Sitting together, contemplating the nature of teacups and time, Will chose to believe that. He wanted to, and to know it as gospel truth. To entertain doubt would have broken his heart, but he didn’t have enough of one left to risk losing again. So instead he leaned forward to close the space between them with a kiss, and said nothing else of it.

\-- 

The woods were silent by night, save for the soft and natural sounds of animals moving through the brush. Under moonlight, the sparse cover of winter-stripped trees offered little shelter for those seeking it, unless one knew where to look. The trees cast tall and spindly shadows across the snow-covered ground. They were deep enough for a man to hide in, wherever they gathered like gnarled fingers to promise safety from the cold. And from violence.

Footfalls shattered the quiet of the forest in the sudden, desperate crunching of boots through snow. The noise was punctuated by the flutter of human breathing, shallow and rabbit-fast.

Will knew he wasn’t alone. The tracks that cut erratically through the snow-cover disappeared into the cluster of trees ahead, lost in the shadows that met around their trunks. As he approached, he saw blood dappling the snow in black spots, like spilled ink.

The trail led him through the brush, and around the broad side of a sturdy tree. He found the other man wounded there, sagging against the trunk. The man bled from a wound in his chest, held closed with one hand while wielding a knife in the other. It was a short, fat little blade, only good at close range and with a steady hand. The man was good for neither.

Will put out his gloved hands disarmingly and approached with measured calm.

“Are you alright?”

“Stay back!” the man spat out in French. The blood dribbling down his bottom lip told Will that the knife wound in his torso had nicked something vital.

“What happened to you?” Will asked.

“I-I don’t know. I broke down on the side of the road, and the next thing I know I’m in the trunk. There was a man—”

Will held up a hand. “I can help you. Just give me the knife.”

The man’s hand wavered. “Why?”

“Because I don’t know if I can trust you if you don’t.”

After a moment, the man licked his bloodied lips. He clutched his wound tighter to stave off the steady red trickle staining his clothes. He didn’t hear the third set of footfalls. Will counted on it as he reached out to carefully take the other man’s blade.

“You would have been better off not running,” Will said.

The man blinked. “Why?”

“I’m not as nice as my husband.”

Before the man could think to run, Will sliced the knife across his throat. Then he caught him by the neck in the crook of his arm to hold him as Hannibal emerged from the other side of the tree. With his own blade, Hannibal plunged it between the man’s ribs to pierce his heart, quickly and effectively. Like slaughtering a pig.

Once finished, Will let the twitching corpse fall to bleed across the snow in a deep black pool. He didn’t realize he was breathless until his lungs began to burn from the cold.

“You let him escape?” Will teased. “You must be getting soft.”

“Hardly,” Hannibal said, smirking. “I was waiting for you to catch up to us. You fell behind, and I wouldn’t dream of finishing without you.”

“How thoughtful.”

Hannibal lifted a gloved hand to stroke Will’s black-dotted cheek, the leather similarly slick with blood. Whether out of amusement or curiosity, he traced the line of Will’s cold-chapped lips to paint them. Will took Hannibal by the wrist with both hands; he felt warm all over as he flicked out his tongue to lick the blood away from Hannibal’s fingers. As Hannibal watched fondly, Will took them between his teeth, biting down on their tips through the leather of the glove.

“My darling boy,” said Hannibal softly. “What a miraculous creature you’ve become.”

“Was it what you wanted?” Will asked, demure but for the blood staining his mouth.

It had all been Will’s doing. The prey, the location, and the nail in the tire that served as the inciting incident. This was his gift to Hannibal: one last hunt, to share. It seemed a fitting thing to do; they hadn’t indulged in such an intimate act as hunting since the night they killed Dolarhyde together. And the occasion marked something to be enjoyed as a family.

“Of course. Any gift from you is more than I could’ve asked for.” Cupping Will’s face between his hands, Hannibal kissed him. Chastely, tenderly, a gesture far too loving for the violence that had prompted it. “Tomorrow you’ll give me an even greater gift when we finally take our daughter home, and make our family complete.”

For it, Will smiled.

\-- 

Her name was Emilia, and her fathers loved her. 

\--

The sudden, shrill cry over the baby monitor sounded like defeat at 12:03 am. Will woke immediately to the warbling howl, startled out of a dim and dreamless sleep. He had only just fallen asleep in the last hour, with the hope that tonight – _tonight_ – would have been the night Emilia slept in her own bed, in her own room. Getting up, he turned off the monitor and found his discarded sleep pants on the floor.

Hannibal stirred beside Will in bed. He reached out to feel the now-empty spot where Will slept, and sighed.

“Let her be, Will,” Hannibal said. “She must learn to sleep on her own.”

“Yeah, well. Tonight doesn’t seem to be the night for that.”

“Certainly not if we keep coming to her rescue.”

Will pulled on his sleep pants and chuckled darkly. “This isn’t rescue – it’s self-medication.”

Down the hallway, Will found Emilia upright in her crib. He turned off the nightlight on her dresser and turned the overhead light on in its place. She screamed, red-faced, her little fists already balled in her blue security blanket.

"What's all this about?"

He hushed her gently as he picked her up, patting her back to soothe her crying. Emilia curled into his chest. Her tears quickly tapered off into a hiccup and then a sigh, and she tucked her head under his chin. Realizing he’d been had again, he shook his head.

“One day I’ll stop falling for that,” he warned her in a sing-song tenor. “Then what ever will you do?”

Once she was quieted, he carried her back to their bedroom to sleep, having given up the battle for the night. There were always little battles like this: tiny power struggles over things like bedtime and bathtime, and whether she detested her usual peas or decided to hate carrots instead. Then Emilia would change her mind and find herself enthralled by Will’s presence, demanding his undivided attention. It was in those moments, when she was petting the planes of his face, or babbling effusively as he read to her, that all the battles faded from memory.

By Will’s own estimation, the situation might have been his fault. He wanted to keep Emilia’s crib in their room for as long as possible, uncomfortable with the thought of leaving her to sleep alone. If he was being completely honest, the short distance between the bed and her crib was more reassuring for him than it was for her, listening to her breathe in the dark. It made the other sounds in the house – the creaking of the settling foundation, the scratch of tree limbs against the second-floor windows – less imperative with her so close. He felt better prepared for threats, real or imagined, if he could easily protect her against them.

To Hannibal, moving Emilia to her own room seemed like a small and reasonable step toward fostering her growing independence. To Will, it was like severing a much-needed fetter. To the ten month old, who was more concerned with having her fathers’ affections at her beck and call, moving to her own room was unacceptable.

Hannibal had already turned on the bedside lamp and dressed in a sweater when Will returned. It seemed none of them were planning on sleeping again any time soon. Gingerly, shifting Emilia's weight in his arms, Will got back into bed and under the blanket.

“Your daughter, Hannibal, has become something of a con artist.”

Hannibal reached out for Emilia and sat her down in his lap. “Ducklings imprint on the first creatures they see. If they see their mother, they grow to become ducks as nature intended. If not, they mimic whomever provides them with love and shelter. Emilia first laid eyes on her fathers when she was born. She’s merely doing what comes naturally to her, because of what comes naturally to us.”

“Give a child to liars, and she’ll grow into a liar?” Will mused, lying down at Hannibal’s side. He took Emilia’s hand. Her fingers wrapped around his thumb to toy with. “I don’t think you have much faith in our parenting skills.”

“I have great faith in you, Will. Just as I have great faith in our little family.”

Emilia began to babble, inserting herself into the conversation. Hannibal chuckled fondly and bounced her on his knee, delighted by her sudden, bright bubble of laughter. Will sighed.

“I worry that I’m too uneven with her. I hold her too much, I don’t hold her enough. I make her sleep in her room, I cave and let her sleep with us…I feel like I never know if it’s ever too much, or too little.”

“We’re her fathers, Will. We’re compelled by instinct to comfort her, and to hold her to us whenever she cries. Even if it’s for our own benefit. It’s far easier to spoil her than to risk feeling insufficient as parents.”

“I would rather she be spoiled than resentful.”

“Oh, she’ll resent us, in due time.” Hannibal bounced Emilia once more. “Won’t you, duckling?”

“Your certainty doesn’t make me feel any better, Hannibal.”

“In order to carve out an identity separate from one’s family, all children come to reject their parents. Emilia loves us for now, but one day she’ll find us completely unbearable. And we’ll suffer those slings and arrows until she decides that she forgives us again.”

“I just want to delay regret as long as I can. Keep things simple. Keep her safe.”

“Of course you do.” Hannibal slid out of bed, cradling Emilia in his arms. “But for now, you should rest. The duckling and I will entertain ourselves elsewhere until she’s ready to sleep.”

“I’m fine,” Will insisted. “I’ll stay up with her. You have work in the morning.”

“You’ve spent the day with her. It’s only fair that I take the nightshift.” Bending, Hannibal kissed the crown of Will’s head. “Go to sleep, Will.”

Begrudgingly, and gratefully, Will obliged.

\--

Fatherhood agreed with Will in ways he hadn’t expected it to.

While he loved the children he lost in Abigail and Walter, with a different but no less significant kind of love, he had never had a child of his own. Much less a baby, which was an entirely different sort of creature. Emilia was fragile in ways older children simply weren’t; she was a precious little thing that needed to be held, and to be kept safe and warm. Will never before understood what it meant to feel a part of himself living separately from him, as though she had been made from a rib plucked from his side. It was at once beautiful and terrifying to feel as complete as he did with his daughter in his arms, somehow as whole as he was helpless.

It was such an odd thought to have now, in the face of things. Before Will feared death and captivity; long before that, he feared losing himself, whether to madness or the hot, animal dark that whispered to him behind his eyes. Now he feared fevers and coughs, and longed for a full night’s sleep without a fussing baby demanding his attention.

Even for it, days at home with Emilia made it easy to forget how either of them had gotten there, and the blood that came before. Feeding her, bathing her, and cleaning up after her; reading to her, playing with her, and talking to her as she learned to mouth sounds. Emilia knew what _No_ meant, although she rarely acknowledged it, and spent much of the day teething on whatever she could find. She was also an avid crawler, but not quite walking. Standing, wobbling, and falling, but not walking. Will was almost relieved that she hadn’t figured it out yet; once she did, she would be even harder to catch.

The killing stopped altogether when she was born, just as he and Hannibal agreed. It was far too impractical to maintain such violent habits with a child to care for and a cover to maintain. They no longer had the luxury of just living for themselves, or even each other, anymore. Instinct never died but it was softened by time and necessity. Will didn’t think about killing with a baby at his hip, a dog trailing his steps, and a house to keep up with. The impulse never truly went away – nor did the thrill of the memory, the pleasure of killing – but it was tempered, and redirected toward other, less destructive outlets.

On occasion, while at the market, he would glance at the latest issue of _TattleCrime_ on the magazine rack. He might be distracted by a gory headline or a tacky crime scene photo, feeling compelled to leaf through its pages. The killers and madmen that bled from the grisly stories had names he didn’t recognize and faces he didn’t care to remember. After being missing for so long, and without so much as a grave to show for their efforts, he and Hannibal didn’t warrant even a fan letter anymore.

The world had gone on without them, and remained a loud, chaotic place in their absence.

In the end, that suited Will just fine.

\-- 

Where Emilia was concerned, Will and Hannibal only ever had one real argument. Insofar that it was an argument; it was more of a silent pact, about which they both knew they would never completely agree. Theirs was an implicitly understood agreement, one of many they had. To postpone regret as long as physically possible – and to enjoy their child – before they had to broach the inevitable question.

The outside world was far more threatening now with a baby to care for than it had ever been. No matter how doomed their little family felt on the outset, they made a place for Emilia in their world. She was safe there. They all were. But that didn’t change the shape of their family, or its construction, or the elements that held it together. Monsters gave birth to monsters, even when they didn’t seem so monstrous to one another. No matter how small they began, monsters turned from the breast and grew. Some were tame, as Will imagined himself and Hannibal as tame; others were beastly, and ran wild under the cover of night. They all hid sharp teeth and lived among those they made killable, like lions resting amid the lambs.

And Emilia would grow to be a lion one day, just like her fathers.

Will chose to ask the question one morning in Emilia’s room. He came upstairs with two cups of coffee, Harrison trailing behind him dutifully. There he found Hannibal in the armchair with Emilia seated on his lap. She was amusing herself with one of her plush stuffed rabbits, chewing on its floppy ears while Hannibal read to her. Will placed the offered coffee cup on the side table, then bent to kiss the top of Emilia’s head. Hannibal smiled at him warmly.

“Storytime?” Will asked.

Hannibal closed the book and reached for the cup instead. “That was the plan, yes. But I believe she’s much more interested in eating her rabbit than anything I have to say.”

Will came to lean against the dresser, watching Emilia for a quiet moment. Whenever he looked at her, he wondered how she would grow. How she would change. What would interest her in two, three, five, or even ten years. Then, eventually, his thoughts turned to grimmer things, like blood and teeth.

“Will you teach her to hunt?” he eventually asked of Hannibal. Quietly, and without impetus or clear motive. His own thoughts on the subject ran in contrary directions, which was why he found it difficult to put them to useful language.

Hannibal regarded him silently. “Does that concern you?”

“It isn’t concern. I’m just curious what you thought. Or if you have thought about it. It isn’t something we’ve talked about.”

“It’s a bit early for that kind of conversation, don’t you think? She hasn’t yet learned to speak, let alone taken her first steps.”

“I’m being serious.”

“As am I,” Hannibal said. “Would you rather we didn’t?”

Will sighed. “I don’t know. I just know I want to protect her.”

“The world can be a cruel place. It’s often full of terrors, far worse than the kinds even you and I can imagine. It would be my failing as a father to shield her from that truth rather than arm her to face it.”

“Teaching her to protect herself isn’t the same thing as teaching her to follow in our footsteps, Hannibal. You and I were born, not made.”

“Nature and nurture are funny things, Will. It’s sometimes difficult to tell where one begins and another ends. But the question is whether you’re comforted by the possibility that our duckling will take after her fathers, or repulsed by it.”

“I’m not repulsed.”

“You’re not comforted, either.”

Will paused, then asked, “When Emilia’s old enough to hunt, what is it you imagine you’ll teach her?”

Emilia chirped at the sound of her name. She threw her rabbit to the floor, and looked amused by the way it landed in a limp sprawl of doll limbs. Hannibal stroked her back tenderly before he spoke his answer.

“When I was a young child, my instincts set me apart from my parents. They saw in me that I was already quite different from other children. I can’t fault them for not knowing what to do with me, but their uncertainty led me to reconcile my nature alone, without guidance to temper my fiercer impulses until I was much older. I imagine, when Emilia is old enough, I would teach her as I was never taught. With love and patience.”

“And without loss?” Will asked. Carefully this time, and wherever Mischa was concerned.

Hannibal nodded. “Yes. Without loss. What is it you imagine you’ll teach her when she comes of age?”

After a moment, Will swallowed. “I would teach her not to run. That way madness lies, and I could never allow her to suffer like that. Not like I did.”

Hannibal’s smile, however small, returned. “Then I believe Emilia will be just fine.”

\--

“Will.”

The sound of his name brought Will out of sleep. He woke to the idle stroke of Hannibal’s hand in his hair and the click-clack sound of Emilia playing with her puzzle blocks. She remained on the floor, where he remembered sitting her down, while Harrison nosed around amid her pile of toys. The fire had burned down to a gentle crackle in the living room’s hearth, leaving the room warm but dim.

Rubbing his eyes, Will sat up. Then he realized he’d fallen asleep, rather gracelessly, against Hannibal’s shoulder.

“Sorry.” He cleared his throat and felt the weight of sleep still heavy in his limbs. “How long was I out?”

“Just over an hour,” Hannibal answered.

"You let me sleep that long?"

“You were tired."

" _Tired_ is a relative concept at this point."

“Why don’t you go upstairs and lie down? I’ll put Emilia to bed and join you shortly.”

Will nodded and indulged Hannibal’s affections as he pressed a kiss to Will’s temple. He rose to head upstairs, stopping first at the bathroom to take a bath. Filling the tub, he heard Hannibal and Emilia coming up from the living room, their voices disappearing as they traveled down the hall to her room. Will recognized the tone as Hannibal spoke, picking out the few familiar, affectionate words he understood of Hannibal’s native language. Emilia didn’t fuss; she never did with Hannibal. Perhaps she would finally sleep through the night, after all.

He washed off quickly and finished up by the time Hannibal entered, drawing over the stool to sit beside the tub. Hannibal placed his hand over Will’s as it rested on the edge. Lacing their fingers together, Hannibal sighed.

“You’ve been exhausted.”

“I’m fine,” Will said. “Emilia’s just figured out that I’m easier to evade when I’m sleep-deprived, so she’s exploiting that for as long as she can.”

“Still, it isn’t fair to you. If you like, we could revisit what we discussed before.”

“What, and hire a nanny?” Will scoffed. “I don’t want a stranger in our house, raising our child. That’s absurd.”

“There’s nothing unseemly about it. My family employed several nannies when I was a young boy.”

“Yes, and you lived in a castle. In the real world, where I come from, people don’t pay other people to raise your children for you.”

“And yet I turned out perfectly fine, despite such an awful hindrance.”

“There have been entire court cases assembled to take issue with how you turned out, Hannibal.”

“As there have been for you, my dear,” Hannibal smiled and said. “But I have been away from home much more than I would like, as of late. I miss you both terribly.”

“You take care of us,” Will said, and meant it. “I can’t ask you for much more than that.”

“A family is much more than just the sum of its met obligations. Perhaps I can clear my schedule in the next week or so, and spend some time with you and Emilia. Would you like that?”

Will nodded. “I think it’d be good for us.”

“Then it’s settled.” Hannibal brought Will’s hand to his mouth to gently kiss it. “Come. Let’s get you out of that tub and into bed.”

Hannibal extended a hand to help Will up and out of the bathtub. It was a sweet but unnecessary gesture, as was the towel Hannibal used to dry Will off. Hair first, then his body. He first let his hands rest on Hannibal’s arms as Hannibal meticulously toweled off Will’s chest; his hands followed to Hannibal’s shoulders when he knelt to dry Will’s stomach, groin, and legs.

It was unthinkable to ever feel unwanted with Hannibal on his knees, looking up at Will the way he did. The warmth of his gaze – the shameless adoration it held, even after nearly three years of having Will to himself – filled Will’s body with heat. Once finished, Hannibal discarded the towel and, without warning, scooped Will up to carry to the bedroom. Will’s objections were ignored as Hannibal placed him carefully in bed.

“I fell asleep,” Will protested. “My legs didn’t fall off.”

“I told you I was taking you to bed.”

Looking pleased with himself, Hannibal undressed. Tie, waistcoat, and button-up first, then his belt, trousers, and briefs. Will watched. He pressed his lips together to wet them, no longer feeling quite so tired.

“Did you want me to — ?”

“I always want you to, Will, but it’s not necessary.” Hannibal got into bed to stretch over Will, letting their bodies touch. He kissed Will – tenderly, teasingly – until Will was leaning forward as he leaned back. “I would much rather see to your needs first.”

Will watched as Hannibal drew away to trail kisses along his neck and shoulder, gentle and feather-light. The press of lips and teeth to his chest made Will sigh as Hannibal moved down Will’s body with his mouth, his fingers, and his tongue. Will ran his hands along the sides of Hannibal’s face before letting them get lost in his hair. Grayer now, in strands of silver and bronze, but producing the same low, pleasured sounds from Hannibal whenever he pulled it.

Hannibal continued moving south to bite the peaks of hipbones, and to kiss the juncture of groin and thigh. Will licked his lips again, already half-hard, but not insistently so as he watched Hannibal trace the seam of his inner thigh. Catching Will’s gaze, Hannibal curled his fingers around the base Will’s cock. He ran them through the coarse thatch of pubic hair that gathered at its root, then underneath, to rub and stroke his sac.

The length of his cock swelled with blood at the touch, and Will watched Hannibal mouth along its underside. He traced it with his tongue before lapping around the flushed head, opening his lips around it to lightly suck. Drawing it in with hollowed cheeks, working down the shaft and back up, slow and controlled. After a few moments of leisurely suction, Hannibal pulled away, his breath hot on Will’s damp, stimulated skin. The sound Will made when he did brought the smile back to Hannibal’s mouth.

“I haven’t had the pleasure of milking you in quite some time,” Hannibal said. Calmly, casually, as though reading the shopping list. Will didn’t mean to look as frustrated as he did, but it was impossible to keep it from his face. “You look so hungry whenever I do, as though you’ve never been touched before. Would you like me to milk you now?”

“You don’t — ”

“I don’t have to. I know. I asked if you would like me to, because I want to pleasure you. But I won’t unless that’s what you want.”

Swallowing, Will nodded. “Yes.”

Hannibal’s smile softened. “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to say _please_ for me, Will. You know I love it when you ask me nicely for what you want.”

“Please.”

“Please what?”

“I want you to milk me,” Will said, the words barely above a murmur. “ _Please_ , Hannibal.”

“There’s my sweet boy.”

Hannibal did as he was asked. He retrieved a pillow from the head of the bed and lubricant from the nightstand beside it, placing the pillow under Will’s hips to support him. Uncapping the lubricant onto his fingers, Hannibal began to slowly, gently ease Will open to him. Will closed his eyes at the sensation of being softened and relaxed, his body giving into the patient pressure of Hannibal’s two slick, curled digits. One finger entered him to stroke from the inside, followed by the other, finding his prostate.

“Hannibal — ” Will called out with a jerk of his hips, unable to catch himself. “Shit.”

Hannibal hushed him with a steadying hand, petting his stomach, his chest, and thighs. Licking his lips, he chuckled softly. “You’ll wake the baby.”

The deliberate pressure spread over Will in a warm and humming wave. It began in a finite point inside him before stretching outward, from the root of his cock to its leaking tip, without needing to be touched. Eyes closed, mouth open, and totally lost to it. Lost to the pleasure as much the feeling of fullness that proceeded it, spread wide on the fingers working him. Pressing, rubbing, circling the spot until his limbs went to rubber and his pulse felt like fire.

Will couldn’t help the sounds that he made as Hannibal milked the orgasm out of him, emptying in a long, steady stream. His body felt boneless against the sheets, muscles slack and thrumming under the skin. Hannibal leaned over Will to kiss his open mouth, dipping his tongue between his lips. Will sucked on it compliantly, too senseless to do much more than that as he wrapped his arms around Hannibal’s neck, keeping him close.

Will then let himself be moved once more. Onto his side and under the blankets, where Hannibal drew him into his arms. Hannibal held him with a kiss, pressed first to his mouth and then the top of his head. And Will finally slept.

\-- 

“I’m thinking of having a dinner party this weekend,” Hannibal said over breakfast.

Breakfast for the adults was comprised of eggs benedict, orange juice, and coffee, while Will fed Emilia oatmeal by the spoonful. More oatmeal ended up on her highchair tray than it did in her mouth, as Emilia growled and gnashed loudly, eating the way she saw Harrison eat. She paused her theatrics only to give to fits of laughter at her father’s encouraging amusement.

“Nothing too ostentatious. Just a few colleagues and their spouses. I would like to keep the menu simple, as well – perhaps rabbit, or quail.”

Will visibly winced at the idea. “I don’t suppose there’s any way your husband could be conveniently waylaid by family tragedy and unable to attend the party?”

“You don’t want to host with me?” asked Hannibal.

“I have at least one fictional grandmother I would be willing to sacrifice to get out of dinner, yes. But you could have the whole set, if you like. A fiery car crash ought to do it.”

Hannibal smirked. “I don’t begrudge you not wanting to, but I had hoped you would be there. You know I always enjoy showing you off whenever the opportunity presents itself.”

Will snorted at that. With him distracted, Emilia grasped for the spoon to begin playing in her oatmeal.

“Trying to appeal to my ego, Hannibal? You’re really reaching for it today.”

“I often do.”

“Make a list,” Will offered, by way of a compromise. “I have to run errands today. I’ll stop by the butcher while I’m out.”

“Does that mean you’ll attend?”

“That means I’m running errands. I haven’t decided yet.”

Hannibal stood to clear the table. Will returned to feeding the baby, wiping the worst of the mess from her hands and face first.

“I was serious about what we discussed last night,” Hannibal said. Over his shoulder, disappearing into the kitchen to place the plates and cups into the sink to wash.

“What about?” Will asked when he came back.

“Spending more time with you and the baby. It might do us all some good to leave the city. Perhaps we could go on holiday in the country for a few days?”

Will shrugged. “I don’t know. Emilia doesn’t travel well. She gets anxious easily, and bored.”

“You may be the one who gets anxious for her, Will. God forbid you enjoy yourself for any length of time.”

“I just don’t want her to get riled up about something else. She’s been enough of a handful lately as it is.”

“Or perhaps you’re just frustrated, and you’ve become the overprotective parent to compensate.”

“I’m _not_ overprotective,” Will said. “This is a completely rational level of protectiveness, given our lifestyle of choice. And that is some lazy psychiatry, even coming from you."

“Will, please. It isn’t a slight.” Hannibal came to rest his hands on Will’s shoulders, giving them a gentle squeeze. “If I promise not to make you come to the dinner party, would you be so kind as join me and our child on holiday?”

Will gave in with a sigh. “I guess I don’t have a choice if you’re going to insist on being reasonable about it.”

Hannibal smiled. “Good.”

Once the dishes were done and Emilia was dressed, bundled in a coat and hat, Will took Hannibal’s list as he left to complete the day’s errands. The pharmacy for baby aspirin, the dry cleaners, the market, and the butcher for rabbit. It had become a familiar routine, these days filled with the uniformity of domestic life. Emilia amused herself in the stroller as they went from shop to shop, plied with her favorite plush toy and some soft crackers. She would be cranky within an hour, ready for a nap, but for now she was content as Will pushed the grocery-laden stroller down the avenue.

The sudden, sharp feeling of being watched came over Will just after noon. It was an uncomfortable, but altogether familiar, sensation; the kind that came of years in law enforcement, and honed even more by a life in hiding. Like noticing the exits in every room, or finding it too uneasy an experience to sit with his back to the door. It was the sound of footsteps trailing closely behind them that first gave him pause. It followed him for two blocks.

He thought it was just his imagination, but the consistent, unwavering tread of booted feet matched his pace, never letting him travel too far ahead. Never getting out of earshot. Stopping, he turned, and saw the typical ebb and flow of human traffic. People bustling about to and from shops, making conversation, or tending to fussy children. No one stood out or looked particularly suspect, until he noticed a silhouette at the other end of the street.

The figure was constructed of a high-collared coat and wide-brimmed hat. Their squared form was blurred by distance and the sunlight peaking in the sky behind them. The figure paused; Will felt certain, in some primal part inside his skull, that he was being studied. Finally, the flutter of their coat signaled motion as the other person turned to disappear into the doorway of a nearby store. The world fell away in that moment, light and sound fading into white noise as the last three years slipped like water through his fingers.

He didn’t want to see it. He didn’t know if he even had seen it, or if he’d dreamt it with his eyes open. But he knew – it had to be Jack Crawford. Emilia began to babble impatiently and Will gathered himself again. He pushed away the fear with a shake of his head and kept walking, down the street to where he parked the car.

Betray nothing. Keep walking. Think, he told himself. The police hadn’t come, and there was no evidence to tie either him or Hannibal to any crime they’d committed since they arrived in Paris. If this was the FBI, a SWAT team would have already surrounded their home to drag them out, dead or alive. If this was Jack – _if_ , Will reminded himself, because he didn’t know for sure – then he was most likely alone. And that meant Jack was here for Will.

Jack would come to Will as a friend. He would want to confront Will alone, separate from Hannibal. He would want to convince Will that he could help him – that Hannibal was dangerous. He would tell Will that their child would be safe if he cooperated.

And then Jack would die, because Will would kill him.

Cold, certain dread propelled Will to the car. He put Emilia in her car seat, and the groceries and stroller in the trunk. He refused to let his hand shake as he pulled out his phone and pressed Hannibal’s number.

“Hello?”

“They know.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’ve been followed for the last two blocks.”

“I can be at the train station within the hour. You and Emilia will meet me. Leave everything else behind.”

“Fine. I’m going back to get Harrison and we’ll meet you.”

“Will – ”

“Hannibal, shut up. I’m getting the dog.”

“Be there _within_ the hour. We’ll be gone by tonight.”

“Okay.” The ache of loss stabbed Will between the ribs, and he felt powerless to stop it. “I love you.”

“I know,” Hannibal said. “And I will tell you so myself when you get to the train station.”

Will drove home. The grind of his severe and unrelenting thoughts kept him focused. They wouldn’t get caught. They wouldn’t be separated. They wouldn’t lose their child. He told himself this, because it was objectively true. They would never allow this to happen. Life in a cage without his family wasn’t a reality he could afford to entertain. He and Hannibal had come too far – sacrificed too much – to be stopped now.

He pulled into the driveway and immediately got out to retrieve Emilia. She fussed as he woke her from her doze, crying out with closed fists. She always fell asleep in the car, and he felt guilty for jostling her so abruptly. He patted her back as soothingly as he could manage as he rushed inside the house, calling for the dog. Harrison came as called, a shaggy blur as he faithfully shadowed Will and the irritable baby. Will put the dog on the lead and whistled for him to follow.

By the time Will heard the footfalls coming the other end of the foyer, it was already too late.

“Hello, Will.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> While this was originally intended to consist of only five chapters, the final chapter ended up far too long to post in its entirety. So I chose to broke this chapter into two. The sixth and final chapter is forthcoming.


	6. Chapter 6

“Hello, Will.”

The fear struck Will first. It came on hot and unrelenting, to sweep him away in the primitive rush of fight-or-flight. He took inventory of his circumstances. Focused. There was ten feet of space between him and the intruder at his back. He had no weapon, no knife, and his daughter was in his arms. Emilia fussed, wrestling against him as he clutched her to his chest. Harrison raced to the end of his lead to bark and snap, but there wasn’t enough bite behind it to make a difference. They were vulnerable to violence, and he was too compromised to defend them.

Then, as the initial wave of panic broke, Will’s brain caught up to the voice drifting in from across the foyer – the softness of it, the stress of the syllables. The sudden relief of hearing it, as the shape of the scene changed.

“Hello, Chiyoh.”

Will turned, still holding Emilia tightly. Chiyoh stood in the doorway to the kitchen with her rifle in hand. Her collared coat was buttoned to her chin; the fall of her long, straight hair was obscured by the slope of her wide-brimmed hat. Her rifle remained trained on the ground between them, but her gloved hands rested firmly on the trigger. She studied him, her mouth set in a stern line, eyes unkind. The last time they spoke, he had hardly earned her kindness. He knew better than to ask for it now.

“Were you the one following me?” Will asked, and felt greatly disadvantaged. He should have been armed for this conversation. Chiyoh was in a position to hurt them, and he couldn’t trust her not to try. He couldn’t trust anyone when he was already so defenseless with Emilia’s warm weight in his arms.

“Yes.”

He felt reassured by that. The sentiment was short-lived, and quickly replaced by a sharp irritation at the scene as presented. “Can I ask _why_ you were following me?”

“I came for Hannibal and found you instead,” she answered. “The last time we saw one another, you tried to kill him.”

“The last time we saw one another, Chiyoh, you shot me. So you’ll have to forgive me if I’m not bursting with joy to see you again.”

“Where is Hannibal?”

“At work. He’ll be home tonight. Or he will be, once I tell him it was you trailing me and not the FBI.” He took a step forward. If she wanted to shoot him, she would have done it already. “Why are you here?”

“I was sent for.”

“By Hannibal?”

“For him.”

Chiyoh’s gaze flicked to Emilia, who continued to squirm uncomfortably in Will’s arms. Her trigger finger twitched. She looked back to Will.

“Is she your child?”

“Yes,” he said. Guardedly, he added, “And Hannibal’s.”

The iron in her steady gaze fell away, her expression softening by degrees. She paused. “Much has changed since the last time we saw one another.”

“A great deal more than you know.”

Silence, then. Neither of them moved, nor did either of them attempt to give the other a reason to. Finally, Will spoke again.

“You can stand in my house and contemplate shooting me… _again_ …or you can allow me to offer you tea while we wait for Hannibal.”

“Yes,” she said. “Or perhaps something stronger.”

He nodded. “Stronger would be fine.”

\--

“Where did you go, Chiyoh?”

The sun-lit veranda made a suitable place to sit and talk without the need for weapons. It was warmer there, under the midday sun, and shielded from the cut of the breeze. They drank bourbon in opposing chairs and watched the street below. Emilia and Harrison sat together in the study where it was warmer still, fenced in at either door where Will could keep an eye on them.

Chiyoh took a drink from the mouth of her glass, staining the rim with the deep red of her lipstick. She used her thumb to wipe it away.

“I promised Hannibal I would watch over him. When I left, he was safe in your cage, so I traveled as far as I could go. For as long as I could go. Until I was found again, and taken back home.”

Will settled back in his chair and regarded her for a moment. Her eyes followed the paths of people on the sidewalk below, distant and cold. Careful to avoid his.

“You didn’t want to be found?”

“No. I wanted to stay lost. To live simply, and without the burden of the past.”

“I suppose you deserved that much, after what Hannibal put you through.”

“And you, too,” she reminded him.

“And me, too,” he conceded. “But you still came back for Hannibal.”

“I was tasked to find him. I came back three times to see that he was still safe where you and I left him. When I came back the fourth time, he was gone, so I followed him here. I didn’t expect to see you – nor did I expect to see you with his child.”

He took a drink. The bourbon burned all the way down and tingled in his fingertips. “You once told me there were means of influence other than violence. It just took some time to parse out precisely what they were where Hannibal was concerned.”

“A family isn’t created by chance.” She looked at him, the way she looked when she was hunting fowl. He recognized that look very well. “You didn’t get here by chance.”

If this were any other person, Will wouldn’t have felt obliged to explain himself. The nature of his marriage to Hannibal, and all of its compositional elements, resisted a clean or satisfactory description. Such an explanation was far too equivocal to say aloud. It would have sounded like an empty rationalization to anyone else, who couldn’t grasp the hard-fought battles that led to this moment. To sitting on a veranda, nursing a drink while his daughter played with the dog in the next room.

But Chiyoh knew Hannibal longer than anyone. She cared about him, and trusted him at his word, in ways and for reasons Will knew he would never understand. He knew he didn’t have to, either, because it wasn’t his to know.

“Families are webs of good intentions, where we sometimes find ourselves caught,” he said. “Or where we choose to be caught.”

“You caught Hannibal.”

“I did.”

“He let you do this? After everything you said he’s done to you?”

Will smiled reflexively. “Years ago, before you and I met, I was asked to hunt him. And I did. I caught him, I put him in a cage – and when I let him out, I tamed him. Now he belongs to me.”

She took another drink and turned her gaze to the study. To Emilia, who babbled at the dog, and affectionately rubbed his fur as he laid at her side.

“You don’t tame beasts, Will. You can’t own them, either – no more than you can trust your children to them.”

“You don’t believe I’m here in earnest?”

A pause. “I believe you forgive the way he forgives. And I believe that is a dangerous place for a child to be.”

“Because of Mischa?”

“Because of you,” she said. “I understand why Hannibal is who he is. I don’t understand why you are what you are, or why you do what you do for him.”

The conversation was veering dangerously close to confession. Will sat forward to cup his glass in his hands and clear his throat. He wasn’t raised with the tradition, but it felt appropriate enough. Like sitting in a little wooden box, its window veiled, the whole of it built and sealed under the weight of Chiyoh’s solemn gaze. This wasn’t a truth that needed telling, but he chose to tell it, nonetheless. It would make things easier. Clearer.

“In the time Hannibal and I have been together, I’ve asked him for everything he could give, because I know I have that power over him. In all that time, the only thing he ever asked of me in return was to give him a child. And…I did. Because that’s what I knew would make him happy, and because that’s what you do when you love someone.”

She swallowed. “Then I’m sorry for what I have to do.”

“Why?”

“Lady Murasaki sent me to bring Hannibal back home, but not to be caught.”

He sat back. The name belonged to Hannibal’s aunt, and to rooms in his memory palace with holes in their floors, their doors sealed behind heavy locks. “Hannibal said his family was dead.”

“Perhaps to him they are. Or need to be.”

“Why does she want to bring him home?”

“I can’t say.”

“Or won’t,” Will said tightly.

“I came for Hannibal. This is a family matter.”

“Aren’t we both family to him?”

“We’ll always be on the outside looking in,” Chiyoh said. Softly, almost sadly. “Because that’s where he wants us to remain.”

“And because you don’t trust me.”

“No, I don’t. But I can see that Hannibal does”

“Fair enough.”

They waited in silence until Hannibal returned.

\--

Will took Harrison for his evening walk. He just neglected to come home at the usual hour, to help cook dinner and give Emilia her bath. When he left, Hannibal and Chiyoh were still in the study, the door tightly shut with him on the other side. It wasn’t his conversation to listen in on; Chiyoh had made that abundantly clear. He chose not to stay and fight a losing battle.

It was well past dark when Will got back. He let Harrison off the lead and investigated the otherwise silent house. Chiyoh had retired to the spare bedroom on the second floor. Behind the door he heard music, something soft and lilting, coming from the vinyl record player. Down the hall he found Emilia in her room, dressed in a freshly laundered pair of footed pajamas and fast asleep in her crib. He watched her sleep, and felt comforted by the steady rhythm of her breathing. The flutter of her lashes against her cheek, the living warmth of her skin through her pajamas. It made it easier to defer the conversation that he knew would follow, and all the uncomfortable variables that pertained to it.

When Will walked to the bedroom, Hannibal was there. He packed, carefully folding clothes into the suitcase sitting open at the foot of the bed. Will leaned against the doorway and crossed his arms. The silence was pointed enough to cut if approached thoughtlessly.

“Well, you said you wanted to leave town,” Will said.

“Yes, I did,” Hannibal answered. “But admittedly this was not how I intended to do it.”

“So how is Chiyoh? I tried to be pleasant, but she doesn’t trust me as far as she can throw me. Give or take a train, I suppose.”

“She’s as well as one could expect her to be, under the circumstances. And I assured her she doesn’t need to intervene on my behalf – unless you give her reason to, of course.”

“I’ll try to keep that in mind.” Will paused, then sighed. “I don’t like having to ask what’s going on, Hannibal. Not with you.”

Hannibal continued packing, as though he weren’t just leaving without a warning. As though he hadn’t lied, and Chiyoh hadn’t arrived to take him away. “A family matter has been brought to my attention. I must leave to see to it, despite my feelings on the matter.”

“What kind of matter?”

“A dire one.”

“You told me your family was dead.”

“Most of them are. An untruth by omission isn’t the same thing as a deliberate lie. I told you what needed to be told, at the moment that it needed telling.”

“When are you leaving?”

“Tomorrow.”

“For how long?”

“As long as is required of me.”

Will shook his head. “Hannibal, stop.”

Hannibal did as Will told him. He met Will’s gaze from across the room, his expression closed. Will knew better than that as he walked to the bed to sit down. Hannibal followed to sit beside him.

“You said you could never go home,” Will said. “That door was closed to you.”

“I know. For the moment, I’m afraid I must make an exception.”

“Why?”

“My aunt became dear to me when I was a young man,” Hannibal said. “She was the only family I knew in a very uncertain time in my life. If she’s calling me home, I could never deny her such a request.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“I can’t offer you a better answer than that, Will. And you don’t want me to lie to you.”

“I’m not angry with you, Hannibal. I’m just…hurt.”

“That wasn’t my intention.”

Will considered his next question carefully. It always came down to these moments. Even after all this time, and all of the blood, cruelty, and strangeness of their shared pathology. They still found themselves here: sitting together, separated by questions. It all seemed too mundane – too ordinary – to be the stuff their lives were built around. It all seemed so unreal to think about. So absurd.

Then again, family often was.

“Did she _see_ you?” Will asked.

Hannibal nodded. “Yes. Even more than what Chiyoh knows of me. She never allowed that knowledge to change the closeness we shared. I’ll always be grateful to her for it.”

“If you have to go, I won’t try to stop you. But you know Emilia and I are coming with you.”

“I can’t allow that.”

“You say _allow_ as though that means anything to me.”

“ _Will_.” Hannibal deliberated with a sigh. “You believe it’s malice that compels me to push you away now, but you have to understand that I only do this to protect you.”

“Then it’s a shame I’m not very good at self-preservation. At least not where you’re concerned.”

At that, Hannibal smiled, if only just. “No, I suppose you’re not.”

Another pause. Silence filled the sliver of space between them. Will chose to break it, however quietly the words came as he spoke.

“I was terrified when I called you today, because I thought we were about to lose everything.”

“I know. But this isn’t a loss. It’s an inconvenience, albeit a grim one.”

“No, but this is the life I chose when I ran away with you. I don’t have the luxury of picking which parts I get to leave out. Just as you don’t have the right to decide where I draw the line.”

Reaching out, Hannibal took Will’s hand to hold it tightly. “A life without regret is a life lived without feeling. Knowing that, there are still many things that I regret about our lives together, and how we came to this moment. I find the distance between this moment and those regrets has spared us the worst of their sting. But even then, I would have preferred to spare you of this.”

“Whatever you think you’re protecting me from, Hannibal, it can’t be any worse than what we’re capable of,” Will said. “And if Chiyoh thinks she can slip off to Lithuania with my husband, she has another thing coming.”

They both laughed at that. It was a small, honest sort of laughter. The kind that eschewed the fear of loss, and covered up the hurt it left behind. Afterward, Will let his head rest on Hannibal’s shoulder, confident in his victory. It was more of a compromise than a decisive win, but those were worthwhile all the same. Hannibal held Will to him, kissed the top of Will’s head, and closed his eyes.

“Tomorrow we’ll be gone,” he said. “All of us together.”

Just as it was supposed to be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you made it to the end of this story, I would like to thank you for reading. The positive feedback I received was overwhelming, and I really do appreciate it. This was my first Hannibal fanfic, and the first fanfic I've written in over two years. More than that, I began this story during a very emotionally difficult time for me, and writing it sort of became a form of therapy. So please understand that I mean it when I say that I truly appreciate everyone who read this story, especially if you kind enough to leave feedback. I mean it more than you realize.
> 
> And if it should please you to know, I'm working on another Season 4 (ish) story, so I hope you'll join me for that adventure as well.
> 
> [Edit: I've had a lot of people ask about why the series ends the way it does, [so I wrote a brief Tumblr post on the topic](http://magenmagenmagen.tumblr.com/post/140613274043/another-meta-post-im-still-sorry). Hopefully that answers peoples' questions to their satisfaction!]
> 
> [Edit 2: If anyone is at all interested, [I also write proper fiction as well.](http://www.amazon.com/Magen-Cubed/e/B00J5VEZ10/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_1) Check out my books, if it should please you.]


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